The WABAC machine was a central element of the "Peabody's Improbable History" cartoon segment. The machine was invented by Mr. Peabody, a genius, polymath, and bow tie-wearing beagle, as a birthday gift for his adopted pet boy, Sherman. By allowing them to visit famous historical people or events, the WABAC provided educational adventures for Sherman. At the request of Mr. Peabody, Sherman would set the WABAC controls to a time and place of historical importance, and by walking through a door in the WABAC machine, they would be instantly transported there. Examples of places or people visited are the Marquess of Queensberry and the rules of boxing, the imprisonment and memoirs of Casanova, and Jim Bowie and the Bowie knife. The machine apparently later returned Mr. Peabody and Sherman to the present, although the return trip was never shown. The segment traditionally ended with a pun. The WABAC has two main quirks. Firstly, it automatically translates all languages into English for their convenience. Secondly, the historical figures and situations that they encounter are distorted in some crucial way. The main focus of the shorts is thus the restoration of historical events to their proper course, albeit in a characteristically frivolous and anachronistic way. Either of the names WABAC or Wayback are in common usage, with the term "WAYBACK" explicitly indicated during the segment in which Mr. Peabody and Sherman visit the "Charge of the Light Brigade". The precise meaning of the acronym WABAC is unknown. According to Gerard Baldwin, one of the show's directors, the name "WABAC" is a reference to the UNIVAC I. Mid-century, large-sized computers often had names that ended in "AC", such as ENIAC or UNIVAC. The term "Wayback" suggests the common expression "way back in ."
The concept or term "Wayback machine" has been adopted in popular culture as a convenient way to introduce issues or events of the past, often employing the original line "Sherman, set the Wayback machine to ...". This introduction was used by the character Kevin Flynn in the film Tron, for example. As in the original cartoon, the Wayback Machine is often invoked to suggest the audience follow the narrator back to the past. Frequently such visits to the past are trips of nostalgia, remembering times, places, or things of the not-so-distant past. One example of popular usage occurred in a 1995 episode of the television showNewsRadio, "Goofy Ball", in which station owner Jimmy James says: "Dave, don't mess with a man with a Wayback Machine. I can make it so you were never born." The Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive was named after the WABAC. The WABAC machine is frequently referenced in the Stuff You Should Know podcast when discussing events in the past.
''Mr. Peabody and Sherman'' film (2014)
The movie studio DreamWorks Animation announced in 2006 and again in 2012 that they were creating an animated movie entitled Mr. Peabody & Sherman, which was released March 7, 2014. The WABAC machine is a central element to the plot. In the movie, the acronym is revealed to be Wavelength Acceleration Bidirectional Asynchronous Controller.
