We once had this much faith in governments?

Its a shame because now we all know that no branch of government can be trusted right up to the Whitehouse..

In the new series Timeless, it's a private corporation that does it and the government didn't know about it. At least in the early episodes. And they kept the greatest invention ever under the guard of two or three rent a cops lol. I Think most likely that an evil super villain like Dr Evil, who is insanely rich would have to be the one creating it.

In 1985, people accepted the premise of a lone inventor making a time machine in his garage.

This series is based on two things that were big at the time. 1) The Cold War - The time tunnel was a spare-no-expense top secret government project to control access to time travel technology... And it is frequently implied and occasionally stated in the series that the "other side" must not control this power but that we must, for the sake of world security. The analogy is to nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project - which was a government project that used some private contractors.
2) The Space Program - The example is of of a contemporary government program to break new technological ground in the service of science, but also in competition with the Reds. The government employed lots of private contractors for this.

Of course, this is an Irwin Allen production so very little thought went into it. The scale of the Time Tunnel facility dwarfs all of the Manhattan Project AND the space program combined because Irwin was apparently fond of Forbidden Planet. Thus the effects shots that reveal the interior of the complex are copied from the shots of the Krell machine and are of ridiculous scale. And, of course, the series was pretty brainless with respect to the mind boggling significance of the technology, preferring to drop the hapless characters into simpleminded versions of important historical and folkloric moments, which could take advantage of stock footage from past Fox films.

Point taken!

I remember 1966 very well. No, nobody would have believed it then, any more than they would now. But it was a fantasy-science fiction tv series. People used a skill called "suspension of disbelief" and allowed themselves to be entertained for an hour.