3000 BC

Most ancient civilizations believed that time was cyclic and that it had regular cycles.

1771

Louis-Sébastien Mercier writes "L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais" translated into English as "Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred". The work is a utopian novel set in the year 2440. An extremely popular text (it went through twenty-five editions after its first appearance in 1771).
The novel describes the adventures of an unnamed man, who, after engaging in a heated discussion with a philosopher friend about the injustices of Paris, falls asleep and finds himself in a Paris of the future.
Mercier's hero notes everything that catches his fancy in this futuristic Paris: the reorganization of public space and of the justice system; the comfort and practicality of its citizens' garb; the absence of monks, priests, prostitutes, beggars, dancing masters, pastry chefs, standing armies, slavery, arbitrary arrest, taxes, guilds, foreign trade, coffee, tea, and tobacco.

1838

The Dublin Literary Magazine publish by an anonymous author a time travel story. In this story, the narrator is waiting under a tree to be picked up by a coach which will take him out of Newcastle, when he suddenly finds himself transported back over a thousand years, where he encounters the Venerable Bede in a monastery, and gives him somewhat ironic explanations of the developments of the coming centuries.

1861

The French botanist and geologist Pierre Boitard writes the book "Paris avant les hommes" (Paris before Men).
In this story the main character is transported into the prehistoric past by the magic of a "lame demon", where he encounters such extinct animals as a Plesiosaur, as well as Boitard's imagined version of an apelike human ancestor, and is able to actively interact with some of them.

1887

The Spanish Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau published in Barcelona the book "El anacronópete" (a neologism for "who flies against time") .
The novel is the first to feature a machine that travels through time: the 'anacronópete'. The anacronópete is an enormous cast iron box, propelled by electricity, which drives four large pneumatical devices ending in tubes in order to travel, as well as powering other machinery, including something that produces the García fluid, which causes the passengers not to grow younger as they travel backwards in time. The machine's interior also contains all kinds of conveniences including, among other marvels, brooms that sweep by themselves.

1895

British author H.G. Wells publishes "The Time Machine." The book's protagonist is an amateur inventor or scientist living in London who is never named; he is identified simply as The Time Traveller.
The Time Traveller details the experience of time travel and the evolution of his surroundings as he moves through time. While travelling through time, his machine allows him to observe the changes of the outside world in fast motion. He observes the sun and moon traversing the sky and the changes to the buildings and landscape around him as he travels through time. His machine produces a sense of disorientation to its occupant, and a blurring or faintness of the surroundings outside the machine.
His journey takes him to the year A.D. 802,701, where he finds an apparently peaceful, pastoral, communist,[1] future filled with happy, simple humans who call themselves the Eloi.
The Traveller manages to get to his machineand and travels into the far future, roughly 30 million years from his own time. There he sees the last few living things on a dying Earth, the rotation of which has ceased with the site of London viewing a baleful, red sun stuck at the setting position.
In his trip forward, he had seen the red sun flare up brightly twice, as if Mercury and then Venus had fallen into it. He continues to make short jumps through time, seeing the red giant of a sun grow redder and dimmer.

1905

Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity shows that space and time are relative, not absolute, and that time is actually a fourth dimension within what he calls "space-time."

1916

Einstein asserts that space-time is curved.

1949

Goedel demonstrates mathematically that walking through time are possible.

1957

The American theoretical physicist John Wheeler coines the term "wormhole" (However, the idea of wormholes was invented already in 1921 by the German mathematician Hermann Weyl in connection with his analysis of mass in terms of electromagnetic field energy).
The name "wormhole" comes from an analogy used to explain the phenomenon. If a worm is travelling over the skin of an apple, then the worm could take a shortcut to the opposite side of the apple's skin by burrowing through its center, rather than travelling the entire distance around, just as a wormhole traveler could take a shortcut to the opposite side of the universe through a topologically nontrivial tunnel.
In physics, a wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature of spacetime that is basically a 'shortcut' through space and time. A wormhole has at least two mouths which are connected to a single throat or tube. If the wormhole is traversable, matter can 'travel' from one mouth to the other by passing through the throat. While there is no observational evidence for wormholes, spacetimes containing wormholes are known to be valid solutions in general relativity.
A wormhole could allow time travel. Intra-universe wormholes connect one location of a universe to another location of the same universe (in the same present time or unpresent). A wormhole should be able to connect distant locations in the universe by creating a shortcut through spacetime, allowing travel between them that is faster than it would take light to make the journey through normal space.

1967

U.S. physicist John Wheeler invents the name "black hole" to describe singularities in space and time.

1974

Astrophysicist Frank Tipler plots paths around a vast spinning cylinder confirming that paths through time can exist.

1988

Caltech University's Kip Thorne suggests using wormholes as a possible means of time travel.

1991

Richard Gott at Princeton University proves that cosmic strings could be used for time travel.

2003

Scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) want to use their atom smasher to make mini-black holes to study Hawking Radiation.
Is it the Black-hole time machine of John Titor?

2003

The "Time-Travel-Portal" research group borns. It's constituted by JohnTitor Shan and other Time Travellers friends.

2005

The Time Traveler Convention is hold at MIT on May 7, 2005, in the hopes of making contact with time travelers from the future.
The convention was organized by Amal Dorai with help from current and former residents of the MIT living group Pi Tau Zeta.
As of the date of the event, it was the most significantly publicized Time Traveler Convention, including front page coverage in the New York Times, Wired, and Slashdot. It was presumed time travelers would have the capability to visit any particular time if they could travel to that general time period at all.
The spacetime coordinates continue to be publicized prominently and indefinitely, so that future time travelers will be aware and have the opportunity to have attended. That location was 42.360007 degrees north latitude, 71.087870 degrees west longitude.
The convention featured lectures on various aspects of time travel from MIT professors and faculty, including Erik Demaine, a MacArthur "genius grant" winner, Alan Guth, an Eddington Medal winner for theoretical astrophysics, and Edward Farhi, winner of numerous MIT teaching awards.
The convention inspired a full-length musical entitled The Time Travelers Convention, in which three college students, who all want to change their pasts, hold a convention in the hopes that they will be able to borrow an attendee's time machine.

2008