 One hushed-up time travel device you might not have ever heard of is the Chronovisor. The Chronovisor is the name given to a machine that was said to be capable of viewing past and future events. Invented by Father Ernetti, an intellectually brilliant priest and benedictine monk, he claimed to have evoked the insights of modern physics with ancient occult knowledge of the astral planes to build in secret a time machine known as the Chronovisor. He asserted that using the Chronovisor as his eyes and ears, he had watched Christ dying on the cross and attended a performance of the now lost tragedy, the Estes, by the father of Latin poetry in Rome in 169 BC. This type of time machine would bring images and audio from the distant past into the present. Time machines that transport people seem well beyond anything our technology can build, but what about an instrument that just deals with pictures and sounds? Something as simple as a mirror is really a type of Chronovisor. We don't see ourselves in the mirror as we currently are, but as we were just a few millions of a second before, the time it takes the light to travel from our face to the mirror reflect off and return to our eyes. Can this principle be adapted? The distant galaxies we view through large telescopes around the world don't actually look like they are today, but as they would have looked when the light left them billions of years ago. If a scientist on a planet 200 light years away had a powerful enough telescope that he could view activities on Earth, he wouldn't see us waving back with our own technology, but life as it was two centuries ago. He would see the Industrial Revolution, not the International Space Station or skyscrapers in New York City. If it's possible to see into the past of a distant galaxy using a telescope, why can't a device be built that would allow us to peer into history here back on Earth? Telescopes compare into the universe's past, but what part of history they view of course depends on how far away the object is. A star 500 light years away can only be seen as it was 500 years ago, not as it was hundreds of years earlier. We can only view what is visible from Earth. We can't see what's on the other side of Orion no matter how hard we try, it'll always remain beyond our reach. The device described by Father Inetti is proved possible by physics, yet we remain in the dark about the secrets he discovered.