Electricity is a hard ask to even attempt to do in ancient times. Luckily there’s a variety of other simpler things to establish yourself as a genius inventor - strirrups, wheelbarrows, magnetic compasses, the idea of a crank handle, and how to use triangular bracing to make a strong truss would be good options.
i would say metallurgy was advanced enough for some very simple generators using a lodestone and copper wire, that could then at least used as a heater or establish electrolysis to advance chemistry quite a bit, but applications would likely stay niche or just a curiosity, carbon arc lamps would maybe be possible but hard.
Washing hands before performing another surgery when you just finished patching some soldier’s infectious wounds.
That’s one with big potential but not one to lead off with, best to wait until you’ve ‘invented’ a few obvious game changers and established your philosophic credentials before attempting to introduce basic medical hygiene…
Maybe invent lenses and a microscope so people could see microscopic bugs.
During a get together someone asked if you could go back in time, what one item would you take with you? My cousin said his cell phone so he could have unlimited knowledge with him. I was called an asshole for telling him it wouldn’t work unless he downloaded it all on his phone and asking how would he charge it.
A phone would be a bit much, but an ereader with a solar charger loaded up with Wikipedia and a chunk of Project Gutenberg would probably last with a bit of care.
This is a good reminder, I need to upload my Kiwix backup to my eReader. I keep a Wikipedia essentials download, survival and medical encyclopedias, and a bunch of “from the ground up” engineering resources backed up offline.
In what format do you keep the backup on the eReader? Is it convenient to browse?
I haven’t actually issued it over to my ereader yet, but I have a Boox so I will probably just use the Kiwix android app
That’s two items. The second one costs extra.
Make them one by diy
No idea how well it would actually work, but having https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ (link to the book’s website, not amazon, because fuck amazon) as a reference manual would probably not be a terrible idea.
That’s a joke-turned-plot element from one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books. The protagonist, a human everyman stranded with a primitive culture on a distant world realises he has no idea how electricity, steam engines, medicine, etc works but he becomes a respected member of their community by making sandwiches.
Mostly Harmless. I didn’t like that one. It was somehow bleak and left me worrying that DNA was in a bad place when he wrote it. I’m going to be a heretic and say that I did like how Colfer continued the series.
In a Discworld novel, an off-hand remark mentions Ponder Stibbons wanting to build a Van-De-Graff-generator by tying cats to a wheel. I wish I could remember which book it was.
I kinda liked the bleak. It felt like an ending. Drove home a fairly central theme
Never read Colfer’s continuation, I read some of the Artemis Fowl books when I was younger and I didn’t really expect him to match Adams’ particular style.
I did listen to the radio adaptation though, and if it’s true to the source then it was… okay? I’m not sure it added much.
You were right, the style change is very noticeable, but id still say it’s a worthwhile read.
I have very few practical skills in the modern day.
But if you need to set up a society from scratch, I can get you electricity, steel, solid agriculture, and a handful of life saving medications depending on climate.
wait what, that’s incredible. Dibs on you when it comes to picking time travel buddies.
I offer: handy with a screwdriver and knows how to make good scary voices when telling ghost stories around a campfire.
I will be burned as a witch within five minutes if im not burned for being such an insufferable bitch within as many seconds.
insufferable about what though?
Most things.
In a social-justice-righting-a-wrong kind of way? Or, like, drama for the sake of drama?
Have you actually smelted and alloyed useable steel from ores before? That’s a choice skill to have practical experience with at a small scale.
Not from ores, and not on my own, but if I spent a minute I could remember how to go from ‘chopped dowm this tree with a rock’ to that at least in theory. Would need help from like a good stone guy to build it.
I think the fault in this “in theory I know this” is that there’s a shitload of small issues that pile up when you try to do things in practise that need that accumulated (practical) knowledge to overcome.
Like trying to find food, shelter, clean water, not dying from literally everything. Then there’s not being killed by the local humans whose land you have just invaded - you obviously don’t fit in and likely don’t speak the language
With the language barrier i can kinda work on it, Romans talked Latin and i talk Italian, with a bit of time i could learn Latin
I would definitely need to try some bits a few times. Less with the biology and more organic chemistry, which is the stuff that sometimes fucks up even when you do everything right.
And there are little gaps. Like i could walk you through decent-ish steel but I don’t know fuck-all about copper alloys, and might have to fuck around woth implementation a whole bunch on a few steps. It wouldn’t be personally fast, but it would be civilizationally fast.
Y’all don’t give yourselves near enough credit for what sounds “common sense” to you.
It would look more like this.
(Click image if resolution too low)
The reaction in that picture is also bang-on though, because Semmelweis got a huge amount of pushback from the medical community at the time, who took offense at the apparent accusation that they were so dirty they were killing their own patients.
Huh. At first, I thought that was about rubbing the kitty with some amber.
“Thales of Miletus, writing at around 600 BC, noted that rubbing fur on various substances such as amber would cause them to attract specks of dust and other light objects.” (Yes, that Thales.) It is still, or again, a popular demonstration, though we use plastic instead of amber. Amber in Ancient Greek is “elektron”.
Well i actually know how to produce electricity so…wait- i don’t have magnets
Quantum electrodynamics, mostly.
Got galvanic power source? Wrap the coil around a piece of iron/cobalt/nickel and blast power at that stuff. After a while, you’ll get a magnet.
Now, how does one make a wire?
You can cast a basic draw plate with regular forms. It won’t be good, and the wires made with it will be terrible by any modern standards, they will also break more easily, but it will get the job done.
Then you heat up fine copper or silver (both can be obtained since ancient times), roll it to a thin wire-like structure, heat it up again and put it through the draw plate. Yay, you got a wire!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t that be extremely tedious while more modern extrusion process would not possible without precision machining?
True
But no one said it would be easy. We have all this machinery refined over the centuries for a reason, but doing rough models first would help jumpstart entire industries that would help recreate the rest much faster and without jumping through the hoops.
Yeahz maybe you can show to some rich dude this new tech or something? Maybe if you are able to recreate a steam engine too you can promise to cut down labor or something
Exactly. Then you’ll have all the resources and funding you would need.
That would take a lot of time
Sure would. But once you can have that, you can build better energy generators and more powerful machines.
What about finding lodestone in beaches?
Can use these, but they may be harder to come across, and don’t have too strong magnetic properties. You’ll need something better if you want to make a decent generator.
Will do for a compass, though.
imagine showing them the quadratic equation and they’re just like “why does this matter” and just being like “idk I barely passed”
Electricity works by moving electrons from point a to point b.
There are different ways of acomplishing this. Easiest is to have an electrolyte between zinc and copper. Kids use a potato for their science class. Volta used cloth soaked in saltwater.
Which is also why call it “Volt” and “Voltage”
I actually read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court recently. It’s one of those things where I knew the whole story going in because pop culture had remade it several times for both children and adults. I got Star Wars the exact same way. But I recently listened through the original on LibreVox.
Twain apparently wrote it to poke fun at a friend of his who wrote stories about noble knights errant, which is why he creates an ancient people who are perfectly ignorant and perfectly gullible, that stories of “rescuing maidens from a giant” were extremely embellished stories of buying pigs back.
Then there’s the entire aspect of a modern engineer teaching a historical people new technology. Twain makes a BIG deal of “Arkansas journalism” and convincing knights to carry advertising billboards with them which would have been very modern and American to a 19th century man. But also he manages to set up a printing press in a land that doesn’t understand pulp paper, a telephone network in a land that doesn’t understand electricity…in apparently a couple years?
Me? I think I’m an above average candidate for this scenario, I’d die in a boiler explosion attempting to build a steam engine.
Uhh… I’ll give it a try. Let’s first start by digging everywhere looking for this natural metal called “copper.” We’re gonna need that for conductivity. Then…um… I honestly don’t know what happens after that.
Just about everyone will be successful at some things.
Everyone knows how to make:
- Fire
- Lever
- Wheel
- Clay blocks
- Penicillium molds (antibiotics!)
- Wine
- Flatbread
- Can work out a very basic steam turbine (pot+wheel)
Quite a few also know how to make:
- Bellows and basic forgery tools
- Various simple fabrics
- Simple water pumps
- Simple carts, bicycles
- Galvanic cells, or maybe even alternating current sources (+wheel=hydro/steam power!), incandescent light bulbs
- Cheese and regular bread
- Beer, cider, moonshine
- Soap
You can also teach them the basics of proper hygienic procedures to keep their food safe, their hands free of pathogens, etc.
Oh man, have you met an everyone? I might be pessimistic, but I think you might be overestimating by quite a bit. A lot of people know how those things work, but knowing enough to replicate even basics feels kinda rare. Even fire, most don’t know beyond ‘rub two sticks together’.
However, if you end up in a Christian land, you’ll be seen as a heretic or sorcerer and burned at the stake before you get the chance to try any of these.
Not if you’re a priest. This is the caveat plenty of people used to move science through the roughest of times.
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I feel like unless you can make everything yourself, logistics would be a problem:
-Bring me Potassium Nitrate
- He is speaking in tongues, kill him!
I think showing just a few simple tricks that you can do yourself would advance you quite high in ancient academia, and then you’ll have some patient helping hands.
How do people in this day and age not know how electricity works? That’s like grade 3 science…
Go back to a time where material quality and manufacturing processes couldn’t produce consistent quality and quantity of things needed to build a basic generator.
Where will you get the permanent magnet, for instance? What will you demonstrate once you’ve assembled a basic generator? Going to make a light bulb? How about a voltage regulator? Think about the manufacturing processes involved in that, like pulling a vacuum for the bulb? I mean, it’s one thing to know that spinning a magnet in a coil of wire makes electricity, it’s an entirely different thing to actually build such a thing correctly and to convince ancient peoples to even help you and not kill you for witchcraft or something.
Copper and lodestone were some of the first materials refined from ores. You can also create a permanent magnet by getting a piece of iron struck by lightning.
Once you have copper and a magnet you can use the electricity to make additional magnets out of iron.
It’s also possible to make a magnet with a compass, a piece of iron, and a striking hammer:
Well, a simple thing to do once you have a coil and magnet is to hook it up to another coil.and magnet some distance away. You can then transfer the spinning action. Something simple to set up would be a fan.
As for not killing me for witchcraft, plenty of folks want to kill me now for much more tangible reasons, so there really isn’t much to gain here.
Most people tend to forget stuff that isn’t important to them in their daily lives.
Without any research, please build a battery right now.
Sure, spare change, coin roll, salt water.
Well, most people here are American.
I’m pretty sure there was research done that showed that people who are hypothetically transported back in time, won’t be able to make any meaningful contributions to the era they go to. They will just end up integrating in that the society of that era.
Basically if you go back in time to medieval Europe, you could introduce something like paperclips to society, but you won’t be able to introduce things like computers even if you know how they work and how to use them.
