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I used to think that it was Einstein. But in H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine", this theory is used to explain the working of the titular device. And the novel came out 10 years before Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity.

This means that this theory must be older than Einstein's works but I cannot seem to find out who was behind this theory?

Was it Wells' creation? Or did he take it from somewhere else?

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    $\begingroup$ Cajori, F. (1926). Origins of fourth dimension concepts. The American Mathematical Monthly, 33(8), 397-406. d'Alembert in 1754 is mentioned as the first to describe time as 4th dimension. See page 402. $\endgroup$
    – Georg Essl
    Commented Nov 23 at 17:24
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    $\begingroup$ Please make a more specific request. Is this about the scientific term or something more loose? or time travel? Is any in these Wikipedia pages useful for you?: Fourth_dimension_in_literature and History of special relativity $\endgroup$
    – Mauricio
    Commented Nov 23 at 21:23
  • $\begingroup$ Spaces of higher dimensions were routinely studied by mathematicians of 19 century, with no relation to physics. $\endgroup$
    – Alexandre Eremenko
    Commented Nov 24 at 13:09
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    $\begingroup$ Check the near-duplicate hsm.stackexchange.com/q/15755/6514. Especially see the discussion of an 1846 text by Gustav Fechner (intended as a satire!) in the top answer. $\endgroup$
    – Torsten Schoeneberg
    Commented Nov 24 at 20:06

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I wrote a comment about this here that I will now repeat.

On p. 1010 of volume 4 of Diderot's Encyclopedie (1754), d'Alembert writes "A clever gentelman with whom I am acquainted believes that nevertheless, one could view duration as a fourth dimension and that the product time by solidity would be somehow a product of four dimensions." I learned this from pages 5 and 6 of Lang's Calculus of Several Variables. Lang remarked that the clever gentleman is probably d'Alembert himself, who was hesitant to attach himself too closely to (quoting Lang) "what must have been at the time a far out idea".

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