Who is Charles's father from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel and what is their importance?

Charles's father is never named in the novel. Seen solely through the eyes of Charles, he is simply described as "my father." Charles describes him as principally a disappointed man. An engineer at a large company, he is regarded by his son as a man of high intelligence whose skills have been undervalued by the corporation, where he has been allowed to slip into obscurity. For years, he labored at home on the invention of the first time machine, finally creating a prototype that worked well enough to demonstrate it to the director of a prestigious scientific institute. With the teenaged Charles alongside, his father describes the machine's principles to the director, but when he gets in, it fails to function. Humiliated, his father withdraws from emotional contact with his family and everyone else for several years, and then builds another machine.