After a failed movement that Hardy started to correct the social decline, he retreated with a young, recently orphaned Clifford as a surrogate son, whom he sheltered from the current world and taught to idealize earlier times.

He wore a costume consisting of typical summer clothing as would be worn by a young man of the middle classes in the year 1900 in the United States—a straw boater, a striped jacket, and white trousers.

To that end, he terrorized businesses in San Francisco that he deemed impure,[3] and later tried to use a hypersonic weapon of his own design he dubbed The Time Horn that was meant to kill anyone in New York City under the age of 65.

It was there in NYC that he was opposed by Spider-Man and the aging adventurer Dominic Fortune, and his scheme turned out to be in vain; although the horn affected all within its range, it had only rendered them unconscious, not killed them.

He owned and used an umbrella that concealed a flamethrower, and rode a tandem bicycle (the rear seat was taken by a dummy wearing fashionable women's clothes of the pre-World War I era) that could fly using "mini-rockets".