Wells was by no means the first to propose the fourth dimension as time. By the middle of the nineteenth century, mathematicians such as Ludwig Schläfli and Charles Howard Hinton had extended theories of Euclidean space to encompass higher order dimensions.
One of the first popular expositors of the fourth dimension was Charles Howard Hinton, starting in 1880 with his essay "What is the Fourth Dimension?", published in the Dublin University magazine. He coined the term "tesseract" in his book New Era of Thought and introduced a method for visualizing the fourth dimension using cubes in the book Fourth Dimension. He is popularily remembered as the author of An Episode of Flatland or How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension (1907) inspired by Edwin A. Abbott's similiarly named novella.