ATTN: New Employees

   Disaster has struck!! We were just days into our momentous research here at the Lab for Experimental Thought Studies when someone broke into our lab, undetected by our security systems!

   Our research had such promise... Only days ago were we peering into the minds of inventors past, aided by our amazing invention, the Retrocogitator! Thanks to this revolutionary machine, we were able to read the minds of famous inventors as they were at the very moment of inspiration!

   However, just yesterday, our testing staff turned on the Retrocogitator to find some strange output. Setting its coordinates for 18 of our subjects, we received nothing but gibberish on the Retrocogitator's main monitor. After examining the machine's logs, it appears that someone entered the lab last night around midnight, and retrofitted the Retrocogitator with a module that allowed the perpetrator to inject false information back in time into the brains of our precious subjects!

   The consequences of this disaster could be dire! Once the time wave reaches 2008, many of the pieces of technology we rely on today could vanish! The only hope is to somehow decipher the gibberish spewing forth from our subjects' brains and to find some spark, some sole word or phrase that will reinspire them to invent their indispensable creations. Perhaps once you've discovered these keys that will reinspire our forefathers, you will be able to somehow use them to figure out how such a perpetrator got past our rigid security!

   I'm much too busy working on the next iteration of our technology, but thank goodness we've hired so many bright minds such as yourselves! I'm sure you can get this mess cleaned up soon. I hear the industrial revolution was an exciting time, but I'd personally rather not go through it all over again...

Best of luck!

Sincerely,

Tim Chronos
Lab for Experimental Thought Studies
Director