Charles Howard Hinton (1853 – 30 April 1907) was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled Scientific Romances.

"[8] In 1887, Charles moved with Mary Ellen to Japan to work in a mission before accepting a job as headmaster of the Victoria Public School.

[6][9] The machine was versatile, capable of variable speeds with an adjustable breech size, and firing curve balls by the use of two rubber-coated steel fingers at the muzzle of the pitcher.

Alicia Boole Stott, his sister in law who knew him at Oxford, supervised the publication of the book whilst he was abroad.

An Episode of Flatland or How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension, to which is bound up An Outline of the History of Unæa[18] made its public debut in 1907, It received an unflattering paragraph review in the British scientific journal Nature (1907).

[19] The action story takes place on the planar world of two-dimensional Astria on which the primary characters partake in pursuits of a scientific and romantic nature.

The book consists of a preface, an introduction, "The History of Astria", and the "episode" referred to in the title, composed of twenty short chapters.

Hinton's work combines various literary and scientific features, with the author intent on popularizing the idea of higher dimensions among educated Edwardian readers including such diverse groups as religious thinkers and believers, experimental scientists, artists, stodgy academics, engineers, politicians, and others of various persuasions and agendas.

Hinton's advocacy of the tesseract as a means to perceive higher dimensions spawned a long lineage of science fiction, fantasy, and spiritual works that similarly refer to the tesseract as a way to understand—or even access—higher dimensions, including Charles Leadbeater's Clairvoyance (1899), Claude Bragdon's A Primer of Higher Space (1913), Algernon Blackwood's Victim of Higher Space (1914), H. P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time" (1935), Robert Heinlein's ""—And He Built a Crooked House—"" (1941), Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (1962), and Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar (2014).

Hinton is mentioned in Borges' short stories "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "There Are More Things" and "El milagro secreto" ("The Secret Miracle"): He judged A Vindication of Eternity to be less unsatisfactory, perhaps.

The first volume documents the diverse eternities that mankind has invented, from Parmenides' static Being to Hinton's modifiable past; the second denies (with Francis Bradley) that all the events of the universe constitute a temporal series.

Hinton is mentioned several times in Alan Moore's historically-based graphic novel From Hell; his theories regarding the fourth dimension form the basis of the book's final chapter.