Relationship between Hubert Twitchell and Leonard Vincent

Hubert Twitchell and Leonard Vincent share a relationship marked by intellectual affection and an irreversible experiment: Twitchell trusted Vincent enough to let him attempt a five-hundred-year temporal displacement, then spent the rest of his life unable to discover whether Vincent had landed in the future or the past. Twitchell’s account presents the experiment not as a triumph of discovery but as a personal failure of judgment, rooted in his willingness to yield to a friend’s eagerness.

Identity and Background

Vincent was a young fellow who taught drawing and other subjects at a school of architecture. Twitchell described him as more of an engineer than a scientist, and remembered both liking him and being drawn to the vitality of his mind. The relationship began as a professional and intellectual confidence: Twitchell shared the possibility of human temporal displacement with a colleague he trusted, rather than treating the subject as an impersonal research problem.

The Experiment and Its Stakes

Before allowing Vincent to attempt a major displacement, Twitchell had conducted minor experiments that indicated living subjects could be displaced without harm. Vincent wanted to go further and undergo a displacement of five hundred years. Twitchell later characterized his own agreement as weakness: he knew the proposed trial went beyond the smaller experiments, yet allowed himself to be persuaded by Vincent’s desire to test it in earnest.

The outcome was beyond Twitchell’s knowledge. A displacement of five centuries meant that Vincent might have arrived in the future or the past; Twitchell explained that the equations were symmetrical and the chances precisely even. He could not say where Vincent had gone, or whether he had survived. The experiment therefore left the two men’s relationship suspended at the point of separation: Twitchell could recount the decision, but had no later news with which to resolve it.

Regret and Consequences

Twitchell’s regret arose from the range of possible outcomes, not from any confirmed account of Vincent’s fate. If Vincent had been sent forward, Twitchell could only hope that the displacement had gone well; if backward, he feared that his friend might have been killed by people or animals in an unfamiliar era. Those possibilities made the experiment, in retrospect, ethically different from an abstract question about what the temporal-displacement equations permitted.

Twitchell concluded that the trial had not been science in a useful sense because it added nothing to the data. His own uncertainty thus became part of the cost: Vincent’s disappearance produced neither a known result nor a reliable account of what the experiment had done to its participant. Twitchell said that he had resolved not to be tempted into repeating human experiments. His later account of Vincent explains the boundary he had set and the personal history behind it.

Recollection and Narrative Significance

Twitchell recounts the episode while responding to a proposal for another human displacement. He interrupts the discussion to insist that the account not be put in the book, presenting the story as a confidence about an earlier experiment rather than as a public scientific report. The disclosure exposes the history behind his refusal: he had once permitted a trusted colleague to make a major displacement, and the absence of any way to learn the result had made the choice impossible to regard as settled.

The relationship is therefore defined by a contrast between scientific possibility and human consequence. Twitchell could describe the symmetrical chances of past and future, but could not convert that symmetry into knowledge of Vincent’s destination. His affection for Vincent gives the uncertainty its personal weight, while his later decision not to repeat the experiment marks regret as a lasting consequence of having consented to it.