Prof. Bartholomew Strangeways

From Vexpedia, The Guide to Time Travel

Professor Bartholomew Strangeways (1804 - 1860) was a Bavarian Goat Farmer turned chemist and scientist of the 19th Century. He was most famous for his work alongside Dr Cuthbert D Holloway on the specifics of Time Travel and its consequences upon Space and the Human Condition.

Early Life

Bartholomew Strangeways was brought up in the foot hills of Bavaria on a small farm where he tended goats with his father Zebulon Strangeways and mother Eudora Strangeways. He also had a sister, Nora Strangeways who went on to write several books on the subject of Animal Husbandry

Later Years

Bartholomews early life was mostly uneventful until he reached the age of 15 years when something quite drastic occured. His father having aquired a new kind of farming device known as a Sythe went about teaching Bartholomew how to use it to farm the surrounding fields where his goats would roam to allow the family to gain extra money from the crops. Bartholomew is said to have been working late in the evening when something quite astonishing happened. It is said that Bartholomew was visited by somekind of sprit or entity that resembled himself as an older person and allowed him to see directly into the near future, giving him visions of what was to come. He is said to have only had these visions twice in his life both times when using the scythe as a young boy. The visions helped him and his family by instructing him to invent something that he called the 'Milk Maid' a machine that could harvest the milk from a variety of animals. He set about making this device, not really knowing what he was doing but recalling upon his visions to guide him. With the invention of this device the Strangeways family became hugely rich upon their captism of the early fresh milk market that was growing in Bavaria at the time. It was with his second vision that Bartholomew was informed that he should leave his family and travel to Oxford, England to study Chemistry and Scientific Theory. With much reluctance he left Bavaria at the age of 18 and with little knowledge of Chemistry managed to talk and pay his way into studying.

Genius

It was whilst being a student at Oxford that Bartholomew flourished. His knowledge of science, physics, maths and chemistry where immense and he ended up staying at Oxford to do his doctorate. Whilst writing his famous paper on 'The Possible Outcomes of Parallel Universes with regard to Conscience' he attracted the attention of Cuthbert D Holloway who was also studying for his doctorate at Oxford. Holloway was interested in the how humans perceived time and was trying to work out a way of controlling time, either by speeding it up or by stretching it out over a longer time frame . Many at Oxford thought that Holloway was slightly mad and derailed by his over use of Laudanum, but Strangeways could see something very tangible about Holloways theories and the two became very close friends from that day on.

Collaboration

It wasnt long before they started to share a laboratory space and focus their joint energies on tacking the problem of manoeuvring time. Cuthbert & Strangeways spent many years refining their ideas before they even attempted to create their first time device. Strangeways named the device the 'Time Hammer' but it was latter to be coined the 'Interstellar Time Wave Modulator' as it could send the holder or any kind of matter backwards in time very quickly. It was around this period that the pair encountered the strange entity they called 'Vexkiddy'.

Death

Little is know about how Strangeways died, it is even speculated that he and Holloway are still to this day forever trapped in a cyclic time loop that the two discovered whilst playing charades in their 'Time Tank'. No human remains where ever discovered at his home address or that of his mother and fathers back in Bavaria.