Great Scott! Doc Brown's Best Back to the Future Inventions, Explained

Published Oct 1, 2019

The citizens of Hill Valley may know Doctor Emmet Brown as an old washed-up mad scientist, but his best friend Marty, and Back To The Future fans know that Doc Brown is actually a brilliant inventor and a genius in addition to being a bit of a mad scientist. Of course, that mad scientist still managed to crack the secret of time travel, even in the Old West.

Even if Back to the Future 4 still hasn't happened yet, Doc Brown has still developed a few other interesting creations from the Back to the Future movies,TV shows, comic books and even video games that bear a closer look. Now, we're going to crank it to 88 miles per hour to take a closer look at Doc Brown's best inventions from across the Back to the Future franchise.

BRAIN-WAVE ANALYZER

Doc Brown and Marty McFly testing inventions

Doc's greatest invention may not have happened until 1985, he saw some success earlier in his scientific career in 1955 when he created the Brain-Wave Analyzer. This device first appeared on the big screen in Back to the Future, when Marty seeks out Doc Brown's younger self after he gets stuck in the past, but it has appeared in the animated series, comics, and even the Telltale Games video game.

The device is intended to allow the wearer to read another person's mind, and when we saw he found some success we mean that Doc was able to kind of infer a few interesting things from Marty about his true purpose and his recent experiences, but those could also very well have been coincidental guesses.

MENTAL ALIGNMENT METER

The Brain-Wave Analyzer wasn't Doc Brown's only exploration into the mind, as was revealed in Telltale Games' Back To The Future: The Game. Doc Brown first created this invention in 1931, and it consisted of a few different pieces that include the Mental Alignment Meter (M.A.M.), the Mind-Mapping Helmet, and a typewriter.

The device would read the brain, analyze the response and interpret the information to reveal the subject's moral inclinations, which were used to help solve the story of the game. Marty was forced to sabotage this device to falsify Doc's own M.A.M. reading in order to break up Doc with his girlfriend and save the timeline.

PROPRIETARY ULTRASONIC MOLECULAR REDISTRIBUTOR

The animated series featured quite a few interesting inventions from Doc Brown, since it focused on him and his family as they went on adventures through time. Some of the inventions included Fance-A-Dance dancing shoes and a giant boxing glove launcher to shoot the Delorean into the air.

The invention with at least the best name was the Proprietary Ultrasonic Molecular Redistributor (PUSMR), which Doc used to destroy a meteor. unfortunately, it was the same meteor that killed the dinosaurs, so Brown and family were forced to undo their disintegration of the meteor to restore the timeline.

DeLOREAN TIME MACHINE

Doctor Brown's best and arguably best-working invention is without a doubt the DeLorean Time Machine. Not only was the invention iconic due to his use of the DeLorean car, which became a monument to a failed car company, but its use in the original Back To The Future trilogy launched generations of fans and an empire of rides, comics, animated series and video games.

The DeLorean DMC-12 is just the housing unit for the time-travel machine, which is possible due to a device known as the Flux Capacitor, which was created by Brown after he bumped his head and saw a vision of the device. It was originally powered with dangerous uranium, but after visiting the future (2015) it was powered by the Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor.

TIME TRAVEL CHAMBER

Of course, that wasn't the only time-travel device made by Doc Brown, as revealed in IDW Publishing's Back To The Future: Biff To The Future. The comic series from BTTF co-creator Bob Gale, Derek Fridolfs, and Alan Robinson explored the alternate timeline created in Back To The Future II when future Biff Tannen delivers a Grays Sports Almanac to his past self, changing the future.

When past Biff uses the almanac to become wealthy and buy up all the land in Hill Valley, Doc Brown is forced to invent his "Time Travel Chamber" out of an old Sears Coldspot refrigerator to stop Biff after a series of murders. However, without the energy created by the DeLorean to produce enough power for a full jump in the timestream, the Chamber can only send one person back for four hours, and Doc Brown and his allies fail to change the timeline, resulting in that timeline's Brown being committed before the mainstream Doc and Marty fixed the timeline.