There’s a book called How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler that covers this stuff. Don’t think it’s comprehensive enough to actually invent everything from scratch, but still a fun read.
By Ryan North, the author of Dinosaur Comics! He based the book on a time travel survival guide he published and made into a T-shirt.
Just finished it. Thank you!
Skip electricity. That doesn’t matter until you can make reliable turbines with copper and magnets. Go to steam power first. It can move things. Which will speed up delivery of copper and magnets. But also teach them to plant trees. Every tree removed to smelt and power a steam engine needs to have three more planted. You could start greening the Sahara before umit even starts collapsing. “he sure had this steam thing figured out. I guess we will forgive him for all these useless trees”.
I read they knew about steam power for a long time but couldn’t make the engines / containers / doohickies strong enough to contain the pressure.
Go to steam power first. It can move things
They had steam power over 2000 years ago, they used it in temples and as toys to amuse the rich.
Slaves could move things, and were much cheaper.
They might have had it, but they didn’t use it right
They had no incentive to use it any better.
Without a printing press, which would increase the levels of literacy, and allow sharing knowledge orders of magnitude faster, there was no indication that a kettle could ever outperform a hundred men or a few dozen horses.
It’s a loop - they didn’t use it right, so it sucked, which is why they didn’t try to make it better = they didn’t use it right.
With the right knowledge, they might’ve just made proper use of it
Yeah. But, could a single person break that loop? It seems to me like it would still require centuries.
I’d say it depends on the person. I’m sure there are some that would majorly change the course of history and then some that would get killed within an hour
I read a sci-fi short story about that once. A scientist brings back a guy from the future, but the guy either can’t explain how things work or does so using a vocabulary the scientist doesn’t understand.
It was like:
“How do you make a teleporter?”
“Well you take a zargnix and put it on top of a floon.”
Actually the floon goes inside the zargnix. Duh.
Aren’t you thinking of the floov compensation harpon? People typically get them confused.
Nah, it’s floon, the “n” stands for non-“v” which is definitely what you want if you wanna know where you’re teleporting too…
Oh sure, if you have one of those carglaian models. But only a total marspopple would have one of those.
You can hack it by bypassing the torrax with a blaqu’ue injection, then you can easily teleport, even with the carglaian model by putting a zargnix on a floon
Oh, yeah, with the torrax you could do that, but if you just upgrade your porz ejector, you can make the whole system cleaner than a Triceptian Fo.
where did read it? do you have a link?
Years and years ago in some anthology or other. Sci-fi short stories are my favorite literary medium, so I’ve read far more than I could count. I wish I could tell you the name or the author.
I think it would actually be easier to wow people than people think. You’d just have to focus on older technology rather than completely modern stuff. If you know that steam engines are a thing, and even vaguely how they work, you can build the king a pump to get running water without having to run massive aqueducts, or a crane to build his massive projects, or any number of directly useful things. An understanding of basic germ theory could set you up to be the best doctor in the world. Or even just a bicycle would probably be quite useful to get around without a horse, and I’m sure anyone could make a rough mockup of a bike.
I think you underestimate what it takes to get modern plumbing water tight and easy to manage. Threading, clean threading, teflon, and easy to manage plastic pipes, have all been invented within the last 200 years. Mostly, the last 80.
and that’s just the literal direct infrastructure within a house. Water towers are not simple. Underground pipes are not simple. Civil plumbing and waste management is not simple.
Yeah, even electricity is easy to explain. You just rotate a high quality magnet within a coil of thin high quality copper wire. Easy.
Problems are:
- How do you make a high quality magnet?
- How do you purify copper fine enough?
- How do you make a spool of the copper wire?
- How do you make the bearings for the shaft?
Nah, problems arise much earlier. Metals are expensive (proper steel is a thing of the 1700s, try getting proper coke) and your claims might be considered too outlandish for funding of home industrialisation, even making the needed tools might take ages.
Depending on when you are, science might even be considered evil, useless, unless you have very clear, direct and easy use cases (e.g. horse collar, compass, wheelbarrow).
Interesting could be the printing press for problem solving.
Proving electricity is easy, since even static electricity is relatively unexplained for a long time. You already know that metals are great conductors, hell, even what conductance roughly is. You know lead acid batteries. Simple conceptual motor and lead acid batteries together with printing press is probably enough to industrialise many societies early.
Don’t know to get acid though.
Actually, I think you just got what you should make first - a simple Gutenberg press. You could probably make it all the way back in the Bronze age, using copper or brass for the stamps and the rest is just wood and rope. You’d just need a basic knowledge of levers and screws, and suddenly you have (relatively) mass-production media.
Concentrate citrus fruit juice
Depends where you travel back to. If you’re in Europe, then good luck lol.
Efficiency would certainly be pretty rough but wire’s been around since about 2,800 BC. Copper would be the way to go if you could manage it but any conductive metal would get the job done to some extent.
Finding a reasonable safe insulator might be a little bit of a chore.
Soft metal bushings have also been around for a really long time.
Efficiency on magnets would be difficult, You might want to just use a really huge battery pile and electromagnets.
The manufacturing tolerances for the axle the wire and everything would be a fight.
I don’t think you have a chance in hell of producing anything in the same efficiency range is what we have today, but compared to not having electricity at all… It might be worthwhile.
The thing is even if you make the electricity what the hell are you going to use it for? For light bulbs are going to need glass blowing in inert gases. You’re going to need diodes resistors capacitors and transistors to do radio, You could probably usher in tubes but that shi*'s almost black magic as it is.
Modern stuff is hard.
Copper is the easy part. Get it hot enough and you’ll end up with high quality copper… Sourcing the copper is much more difficult.
Finding magnets is somewhat simple, you just need some iron… That’s a lot more difficult. Iron smelting is way harder than copper smelting (especially without electricity).
Making bearings is also difficult. It requires not only iron smelting but also high precision machining.
High quality copper isn’t that easy to come by.
lol one of the oldest texts in the history of our species is a complaint.
But it doesn’t have to be up to modern standards, and certainly doesn’t have to be with modern materials. Get the local cooper to make your pipes and reservoir with pitch-sealed wood. Or make it out of stone, or cast copper, or whatever they use to store water anyway. If it’s Roman or post-Roman, they’ve already had some experience with running water anyway, that wouldn’t be the impressive bit.
Threading and such is mostly useful for mass-manufacturing standard pipes and using it everywhere, but at least at first you’d just be doing it for a rich/powerful person or two, where you could do something labour-intensive and unscalable.
I’m not saying that you would get a perfect, modern system straight away, but if you can convince the people to give you the benefit of the doubt through a prototype or two, you could make something that works well enough. That would be what I’d be concerned about, even if you can magic away the language barrier, they’d likely just think you’re mad.
I can’t even draw a bike.
Can you build a metal laythe? Can you build one precise enough for a pump?
Can you get rubber or silicone for gaskets?
There are a lot of problems
I feel like you could still give science a head start by giving them rough ideas of how things work, like penicillin and steam power and whatnot
Even if you don’t know all the ins and puts you can give them something to go off of to develop the technology faster
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“Science” ≠ Technology!
If you give them the technology without giving them stuff like empiricism and cultural acceptance of critical thinking, they’ll just worship it like any other faith, and stagnate for the next thousand years.
Inversely, you don’t even need to give them too much technology, because if you just give them stuff like evidence-based medicine, the printing press, rigorous experimentation and reproducibility, and a couple institutes dedicated to the craft, plus a couple starting points, then they’ll figure it on their own soon enough (assuming an overall stable civilization).
If you paid attention in high school you could bring mathematics up to about the 17th century, if you really paid attention you could even grab some stuff from the 20th (wtf vectors why did you take so long to figure out?) and the 19th.
Plus there is just so much basic stuff you know. Used boiled and sealed water to clean a wound. Bleeding a person only makes them feel good for a bit and does nothing else. Steel in cement makes cement better. Or in the case of this picture zinc and copper and lemon.
That’s assuming you don’t either kill them all off with your 21st century germs and/or be killed because the church doesn’t like you.
Yes, most of my plans for myself run on the unspoken assumption that I am not dead.
I scoff at your suggestion! We must compulsively dissect those unspoken assumptions. This is the internet, you see, where the most brilliant of minds gather to squabble about peripheral details so that no fun can ever be had. Yuck having fun!
anything about sanitary practices faces a massive barrier of getting people to accept and implement it. I could tell ancient doctors to wash their hands, but the first time someone tried that in actual history they laughed in his face.
Monarchs cares about power. Give the ruler some more metallurgy or siege engines first, so you have their favour. Then split the Royal Court’s physicians into two groups, one that washes their hands, and one that doesn’t. Do the same for leeches, bloodletting, hydration, etc. It’ll be hard to argue with the resulting death rates. And in the long run, you’ll have a much bigger impact by introducing empricism/A-B testing/evidence-based medicine than any one thing specific thing you could have done.
But on the other hand, there’s a decent chance of you worked hard enough, they could probably get there at least a century or two after your death.
People were so moronic back then, even more than today, saying any one of those things would have you burned like a witch 😂
Non-historian detected
Steel, like the strong metal for weapons? You want how much of it, and throw it where? And what’s a “lemon”?
They had citrus fruits. It wasn’t a mind bending concept.
Depends on where and when you’d go.
They had “citrons” since 4000 BC or more, which came in many different shapes, some with no pulp and no acidity, which wouldn’t work for making electricity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citron
Lemons were introduced in Europe around 200 AD, and were pretty rare and expensive.
If you went to biblical times and asked for a lemon, they’d likely not know what you meant, then maybe gave you a citron, which could be of the low acidity kind, then beat you up for being a liar.
Steel reenforcement of old European concrete would have been disastrous. They used limestone in the aggregate and cement and it would have eaten the steel in a decade or two.
Ok fine but the smallpox would have killed me before that happens
Me: The opposite of B, the opposite of B, plus or minus a square root…
Them: What does that mean?
Me: I have no idea.
I’m impressed at the strength of the guy’s upper arm that he’s sitting on.
Go back in time with a 4th grade science book from 1997 and be a fucking wizard.
This was the (side) plot of Army of Darkness
He basically was a wizard in Army of Darkness. He made a robot hand in a blacksmith’s shop.
You know, a fun project would be compiling an instruction book for elevating/fast forwarding technology just in case someone does get sent back in time.
We could send them to the end of the galaxy to compile an encyclopedia of all human knowledge but they’d secretly be there to start the next iteration of civilization through the foolproof strategy of not doing much and just letting the pre-calculated history take its course.
Or we could just fly around in space on a religious drug trip until we find a planet with some worms that make some freaken killer drugs.
That sounds like it would cause a major succession crisis and a galaxy-wide jihad.
We will need one against those sentient mitosis using beings from another dimension. The Kinnison bloodline won’t be enough!
You just gave Hari an idea…
Clock of the long now
I don’t know why they put just one zero in front of years. That just makes the clock slightly longer, and it’s still insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
02023 in years only is good until 99999, then you’d need to prepend another zero.
It’s a constant symbolic reminder, and still a 10X scope increase.
If you want to be pedantic about making “the clock slightly longer”, you might as well say “I don’t see why they don’t write their dates out in base 62. Then they could make the clock shorter by writing
wDinstead of2023”. The point is that everyone who sees “02023” can have a bit of an “oh shit” moment where they instantly understand what it means.
There’s a couple of books that do this: How to Invent Everything, and How Rebuild Civilization.
We learn how to generate electricity in Secondary School, it’s pretty simple and fundamental to understanding electromagnetism, and it underpins our whole civilisation’s existence. Surely you’d remember that?
Yeh just gimme a cat fur and a plastic rod. I’ll demonstrate electrostatic on a balloon.
Or just almost touch a TV and your hairs will go there.
Forget mathematics, logic and philosophy. Teach them about Jeebus and establish a solid patriarchy. After that make a shitload of McDonald’s and Facebook.
How dare you not Starbucks their Walmarts! Google is going to Microsoft you!
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One of the newest Brandon Sanderson books “The Frugal Wizard’s Guide to Surviving Medieval England” has a similar premise. It’s a novel so not a how-to guide so to speak, but parts of it are an in-world manual on how to survive in a medieval alternate dimension.
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No problem, just tell them to ask from Baghdad, they should know where it is. :) A jug of wine or vinegar, one electrode of iron, another made of copper, voila… the Baghdad battery.
Any conclusive proof that this was used to produce electricity? Consensus seems to be that it wasn’t.
No conclusive proof. It didn’t have a passthrough for one electrode of the two. It did have remains of acid inside and corrosion on the electrodes. One can speculate whether it was an experimental device, a faulty device or what exactly happened (one alchemist trying to replicate another’s secrets?).
To add insult to the injury, it was lost or stolen during the war in 2003, so more analysis can’t be done until it gets re-discovered. :o
That all said, an attempted reproduction by Mythbusters, with ten of these jars, using lemon juice as the electrolyte, properly wired in series, did work, producing a voltage of about 4V. And prior to Mythbusters, various other researchers built similar reproductions using different electrolytes, which also produced a voltage. There is evidence to support that if the Baghdad Battery was produced properly, it would have worked as an electric power source.
Not my idea, but sometimes it’s just enough to listen to “crazy” people. They might not know what to do with wire seemingly spinning itself, but you will have much better idea what can be created with it. RIP Terry Pratchett
