Corrected entry: In any scene where observers either watch the time machine disappear (miniature demonstration) or find the machine "gone", the observers should actually see the machine still there. Consider that the time traveler (or machine) passes THROUGH every moment of time, rather than "skipping" ahead to any target time (as in "Back To The Future"). This is proven by the fact that the time traveler observes changing day/night, seasons, fashion changes on the mannequin, etc. So, really, his miniature demonstration would have looked lame, because the whirling machine would have just remained there from the observers' viewpoints, not disappeared. In fact, when advanced in time, it would stay in place for 100,000 years or whatever, no matter what happened around it.
Charles Austin Miller
18th May 2014
The Time Machine (1960)
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Correction: Inasmuch as Space and Time are one fabric, as Einstein correctly theorized, traveling through Space necessarily entails traveling through Time (as demonstrated by high-velocity manned space missions, which do indeed prove that time dilation occurs, such that the astronauts return to Earth a few milliseconds younger than they should be). On the same token, traveling through Time necessarily entails traveling through Space. As this pertains to the subject of the movie, the Time Machine was instantly moving forward through Time but also moving forward through Space. Think of it like this: Let's say that you and I are sitting face-to-face having this conversation when I activate my Time Machine and travel one day into the future, in just one second. In one day, the Earth naturally travels about 1.6 million miles in its orbit of the Sun. Therefore, I must travel not only 24 hours across Time (in just one second), but I must travel 1.6 million miles across Space (in just one second) so as to arrive at Earth's physical location in the future. To your eyes, as the observer, my Time Machine and I would simply wink out of existence, then wink back into existence 24 hours later in apparently the same location. You would be 24 hours older and I would be only one second older, but I would also have just traveled 1.6 million miles across space. So, to traverse Time just one day into Earth's future (in just one second) necessarily means the Time Machine must travel the distance to the Earth's future location in Space at a velocity over 8 times the speed of light. In the movie, the Time Machine is not only traveling 802,000 YEARS across Time in a matter of minutes, it is also traveling 802,000 years across physical Space in a matter of minutes, which would be such a blistering velocity that the Time Machine would be virtually invisible and undetectable to even the most careful observers.
Charles Austin Miller