The “Back to the Future” fans will remember that the panel showing the flux capacitor’s state was composed of a three-pointed star, with the points being lamps, to which three cables with the typical rubber pipe insulation were applied. They will also remember that in the first installment, the data chosen for the experimental journey in the future – by the uncertain destiny of the two main characters – was the 21st October 2015; yes, right: it’s a day of this current month.
Back to the future encouraged the curiosity and the imagination of many fans, so that for this date many commemorative events have been organized, some of them even promoting some suggestive comparisons with what the movie proposed (as regards the future destination scenario for Marty McFly and Doc). As an example, the video communication (if you want, it can be rendered today with Skype) and the flying cars (that, by the way, were speculated in movies such as Minority Report as well) that, unfortunately for the screenwriters and fortunately for us, still do not exist…
But after all, during the ‘80s of the past century (as well as even before), the progress led the most optimistic directors and screenwriters to dream an evolution that turned out to be much faster than the one that the laws of Physics could and have imposed; on the other hand Back to the Future was not the only futuristic diversion, since from the conquest of the Moon (and of the Space more in general) led the cinema and the television to propose series such as Space: 1999 (in which it was theorised that the Moon had become the depot for radioactive wastes and that was populated by 300 inhabitants of the futuristic Space Base Alpha, that it was pulled out from the earth orbit and projected in an infinite journey in the Space) and Star Trek or Star Wars.
The fact that the first time travel jump in Back to the Future has the 21st October 2015 as a destination, made us surrender to the enthusiasm that is currently overwhelming the fans of the trilogy, and that stimulated the Maker part of us, a part that everyone has inside. It is a short step from the passion to the idea, and it was as fast to render it in practice: a few hours in the workshop and the project proposed in these pages was born. It is a modern take on the flux capacitor device, and with it we want as well to pay homage to the great dream that Robert Zemeckis shared with the “Back to the Future” fans, and to the passion raised by a time machine version that was more realistic than the ones proposed in other movies, that were certainly unlikely. This was surely because in those years, electronics made us believe what in the end happened up to a certain measure, that is to say that it was the technology to create what once was impossible.
And in a certain way the appeal of electronics is somehow this one, since differently from other disciplines, and being it something that cannot be seen and cannot be immediately explained, we humans are inclined to entrust our dreams and our hopes to it (and differently from mechanics, for example, that is more immediate and can be seen, and thus lends itself less to make us imagine space age creations made by means of it).
