Operation
The operation of the DeLorean time machine is consistent throughout all three films. The operator sits inside the DeLorean, (except for the first time, when a remote control is used), and turns on the time circuits, activating a unit containing multiple fourteen and seven-segment displays that show the destination, present, and last-departed dates and times. After entering a target date, the operator accelerates the car to 88 miles per hour (141.6 km/h), which activates the flux capacitor. As it accelerates, several rails around the body of the car glow blue. Surrounded by large sparks, the whole car vanishes in a flash of blue light seconds later, leaving a pair of fire trails where the vehicle's tires will pass arriving at the destination time. Observers outside the vehicle see an implosion of plasma as the vehicle disappears, while occupants within the vehicle see a quick flash of light and instantaneously arrive at the target time in the same spatial location (relative to the Earth) as when it departed. In the destination time, immediately before the car's arrival, three large and loud flashes issue forth from the point from which the car emerges from its time travel. After the trip, the DeLorean is extremely cold, and frost forms from atmospheric moisture all over the car's body.
A few technical glitches with the DeLorean hinder time travel for its inhabitants; in the first film, the car has starter problems and has a hard time turning over once stopped, much to Marty's repeated frustration. In the second movie, the time display malfunctions and shows random dates, which partially cause Doc to be sent to 1885. In the third movie, the fuel line rips while the car is off-road, preventing the car from running under its own power.
Read more about this topic: De Lorean Time Machine
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“Waiting for the race to become official, he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. The only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of “Wut,” is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)