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I have nothing to add to this comment. I just want to make sure everyone knows that “the Baghdad battery” name goes fucking hard.
Any conclusive proof that this was used to produce electricity? Consensus seems to be that it wasn’t.
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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.
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.
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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?
Modern stuff is hard.
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.
And you need knowledge of the local language they might not even have a written form yet. No point in a printing press when you don’t have symbols to print.
Concentrate citrus fruit juice
Depends where you travel back to. If you’re in Europe, then good luck lol.
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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.
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.
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.
Language isn’t too much of a problem depending on the region. Assuming this is Rome or shortly before, Koine Greek and Latin are well enough known that you can learn it after a few years of study if you’re good with languages.
Yeah, but I’m assuming you just get dumped there with minimal preparation. Otherwise you could also study up on early technology and know exactly what to make and how to make it to be impressive. And the ‘convincing them you’re not mad’ problem still exists.
If you know that you get dropped in 14th Century England you could also prep and study Middle English since the Canterbury Tales is the first book written in that language. And we still have surviving copies.
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.
The romans did manage to build a nice system, tho. I hear the persians also managed one.
Steam engines are more complicated than people seem to think. There’s more to it than just boiling some water and voila! They’re pretty much useless without a governor. How many people know how to make this crucial component?
I can’t even draw a bike.
But first, you need all the guns (and other modern weaponry) to gun down anyone trying to kill you. Might be useful to make them listen to you as well.
found the redneck.
apparently common sense survival in an unfamiliar hostile place is a sign of being a redneck
First thing coming to mind being how to fight other people is very redneck, yes. Only emotionally retarded people think like that.
You must be fun at parties 🙄
Eh. Like 90%+ of everybody who ever lived in pre-Industrial civilization was a slave or a serf or something like that. What does that say about the other 1% that “owned” them? And if your goal is explicitly to bring lots of revolutionary technologies, you’re probably going to disrupt a lot of established power structures. People in power don’t tend to take kindly to that, and as the ultimate outsider, you’ll be the perfect scapegoat for anything that goes wrong.
It’s dumb to think only about fighting, and this specific scenario isn’t something that you’re ever going to be able to win through brute force alone. Also, using guns “to make them listen to you”, as the original comment said, sounds pretty evil depending on how it’s done. (E.G. Menace and threaten anyone questioning you: Evil. Gain favour with the royal army by providing guns, then ask for funding for medical research: Less evil.) But ultimately, it’s reasonable to be prepared for other people to act in bad faith.
this person gets it
Hopefully they will understand modern day English
This is kinda the premise of Brandon Sanderson’s new book The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook to Surviving Medieval England lol, I recommend it! It’s one of the secret project Kickstarter books so it might not be on regular shelves yet but it should be soon, and the audiobook is out for sure
trebuchets now exist in 3500 BC
gun powder enters the chat
Fossil Fuels is typing…
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.
There’s a couple of books that do this: How to Invent Everything, and How Rebuild Civilization.
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!
Hail Seldon
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I want this for when climate collapse destroys modern civilization and the survivors are left to rebuild society without the benefit of global supply chains or information infrastructure.
Download wikipedia. Its not only possible, but its actually easy. There are some apps for it, see Kiwix and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download. Just bring a couple phones and some solar panels for when they run out of charge.
I’ve put a bit of thought into this and I feel that even if you could bring every blueprint for every technology ever made onto a computer with 10 backups, you would still need to be extremely lucky on whether you get people skilled enough to recreate those technologies.
You’d need the social skills to demonstrate technological improvements (say, a better axe) without causing everyone to freak out and call you a demon. You’d also have to keep your phones and charging devices secret until after you’ve recruited a few technophiles because otherwise someone is going to break them accidentally when they confiscate them for one reason or another.
Basically you need to recruit a few smart people who can be trusted and get them on your side. You might even want to funnel all your “inventions” through them to keep the heat off you, and this is assuming you end up in a culture that would even value technological advancement.
this is assuming you end up in a culture that would even value technological advancement.
People value their friends and family not dying, and the murdering raiders from neighbouring tribes being kept at bay. And people that don’t value that don’t tend to last very long.
You’d need the social skills to demonstrate technological improvements (say, a better axe) without causing everyone to freak out and call you a demon.
…Starting with an axe would be nice. The lumberfolk would appreciate it, surely. But then what happens when the old blacksmith blames your witchcraft for the crops failing next year, or for the village chief’s child falling ill? So maybe teach the blacksmiths too, so they also benefit from you— I’m sure they’ll love having some upstart come in and tell them how to do their jobs.
You’re an outsider, no matter what, and you’re never going to completely look like them or sound like them or act like them— Can we really think that any amount of social skills will be enough to keep you safe, when they might just be determined to hate you for what you are?
Maybe start with a combination of military and medical technology. Show them a crude crossbow; when they see the next raid of Goths or Aztecs or Mongols or Vikings or Peloponnesians or whomever being repelled before they even reach the gates, they’ll come to appreciate it sooner or later… Their enemies are against their gods, so if you helped defend them from their enemies, you must be sent by their gods. Disgustingly, hating the same out-group is a great way to keep yourself safe in any given in-group, whether at work or at war. Medicine’s probably trickier, because if you fail to save somebody then some people will probably blame you for their death. But if you make it clear that you can’t stop fate from running its course, and you start with some basic stuff, they’ll probably come to appreciate that their friends aren’t dying as much from infections anymore too.
Fear of death has always been sadly the strongest motivator for embracing technological change. Modern aviation, computing, and nuclear science all came after WWII; and “anti-vax” movements only thrive in countries that have already essentially eradicated the concerned diseases. It’ll be harder for them to crucify somebody whom they can see is standing between them and death.
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.
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Unlikely. It looks like this would be around the time when magi were about.
Before or after you cause a pandemic with our modern germs and illness?
I think you’d be more likely to be the one infected
Why?
Because your immune system isn’t used to being constantly bombarded with those pathogens.
Antibiotics are the only thing that keep most modern day people alive. That and sanitation didn’t really exist back then.
IIRC you’d either already have been exposed to the more deadly diseases but have immunity because of widespread exposure, inherited immunity, and being exposed to less dangerous forms that evolved- or in many cases having likely been immunized as a child. As for bacterial infections yea- but people of that time would be at just as much risk. But, they’d be at a lot more risk of viruses from you because they wouldn’t have those immunity factors.
Electricity is easy to make though… a couple magnets and some copper wire.
Easy materials to get from your local 1st century hardware store
they’d probably have non-shitty copper by then, but magnets? thems witchcraft
Most people dont even know how to make wires.
really? isnt it just forcing/extruding hot metal through a die?
Don’t forget it’ll need to be covered with an insulator, else your coils would short circuit and not producing any current. So you’ll need some chemistry to produce insulator thin enough to create your generator.
How would you buy copper with no money? It’s not like you can exchange your modern money to their currency. So first you need to find a job and any good paying job is probably protected by guilds and you don’t even speak their language so good luck finding a mentor who will offer an apprenticeship. You will be a peasant. Nothing more than a subsistence farmer who has to rent the land and give half his yield to the local lord. Hunting? Killing anything bigger than a fowl will get you in trouble since big game is property of the lord.
Also copper ore doesn’t lie freely on the ground. You need to mine for that shit and be lucky that there is a source in the vicinity, since you can’t travel very far. Can’t buy a horse with no money.
And if you found a source you need to convince an entire community to help you mine for copper. You sure as hell can’t do it alone. Good luck convincing them when everyone is busy tending their crops to prepare for the winter. And you don’t even speak their language.
i guess that if we’re going to go the fantasy route, then I’d just steal everything I needed - the strong do as they please and the weak submit, after all. violence is the only language I’d need to speak
I imagine that the best way to make money would be if you manage to build a rm rudimentary still.
I feel like moonshine would be relatively easy to do and a great way to make profit of no one kills you before.
Distilled alcohol is quite rudimentary to produce but only appeared late in history. Plus it is great for leisure application, food conservation or medicine.
How do you get the materials for a still with no money?
There’s always the world’s oldest profession…
Good luck convincing them when everyone is busy tending their crops to prepare for the winter.
Just sprinkle some bird poop or bat guano or whatever other nitrogen and phosphorus-rich gunk onto it
when they aren’t looking.
How do you make the die?
Big-ass piece of cast iron with a little hole in it.
If you can convince them you know the end product I’m sure the king can point you to his metal workers and in a lot of cases come up with a solution.
Also, it’s labor intensive but I think you can beat it into wire or use some other methods.
If the king says to the blacksmith “make that copper long ans skinny” he can probably make it happen.
What tools do you use to precisely work cast iron into a small hole to create your die?
1st century? probably with diamonds.
It is, but the ancient method is tedious as fuck. It was basically just pulling a piece through dozen of gradually smaller holes, by hand. I dont think you could do one pass extrusion without all of the precision machinery needed to manufacture such machine. But I aint a blacksmith, I just saw the process in some documentary a while ago.
No :)
Depends on if Ea-nasir was still in business.
lodestones lol, people have known about those for aaaaaaaaaages
Probably easier to use a lemon and copper plates. Not sure what you’d connect to it though
Use it for electroplating/etching, that’s cool as shit
And don’t forget that you need to demonstrate that it’s producing a current. Just get a light bulb, right??
Plating a metal object with a different metal would probably be the simplest, impressive thing. Or just heating a thin wire?
If you can make a generator you can make a motor, just connect them together and have one move when you spin the other
The could do the same with a belt, go away with your flash nonsense youngling
probably go with a hand-crank zapper or something. it’s tricky to do much without resistors and capacitors.
Zap the royalty to prove your point and get flayed and executed for it
You can literally mine lodestone and copper. Ancient people have mined those two things since antiquity. Where do you think it comes from now? Fairies?
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You literally could just go dig some yourself while they’re away and procure it that way.
What do you think copper ore looks like? What tools would you use?
Ancient mining was a punishment, generally a death sentence. It’s hard work often overseen by a slave master.
Copper ore isn’t concentrated copper either a lot of ore goes into a little copper. There’s a reason only the really wealthy had copper items.
Well, in this scenario we’d presumably have our electronic devices with us anyway, so it’s honestly a moot point.
It’s amazing what some people here think would be such a simple task in the ancient world.
Bring a live translation device, and program it with whatever the expected language is. That alone would be magic to them. And you don;t need to go to a copper mine, there were markets for processed copper. Pulling it into wire is just a case of roughly forming it into a cylinder, then pulling that cylinder through successively smaller holes. A local smith could help you with that.
And then hope they don’t kill you for being a witch.
Copper wire: yes. Magnets, get lodestones
Magnets, how do they work?
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You can induce voltage on more than just copper you know. Or maybe you don’t know. You probably don’t know.
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Ever wonder why it goes bronze age and then iron age? It’s because it’s a minor miracle humanity discovered how to smelt iron. Iron requires temperatures higher than you can achieve with just wood. Iron absorbs carbon and sulfur making it worthless (in the wrong mixtures).
The process is complex and resource intensive.
Assuming a bronze age civilization, copper or tin is the best you can hope for. Finding a magnet is going to be difficult because there’s not really ferromagnetic materials available. In the modern era the most common material is iron.
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.
That’s true, it was cannon technology that allowed steam engines to be created
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A great master plan to prevent climate change, although the industrial revolution will start 2000 years earlier, so I’m not sure it matters
The sooner it starts the sooner I can get back. :)
Yes, electricity would be magic for medieval (and prior) people. Spells trouble for you.
But no, Steam… the principle was known and seldom used by ancient greeces and egypts already, but they couldn’t really utilize it, because metallurgy wasn’t there yet.
And Sahara was almost green 1000+ years ago, lots of oases.
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
Is there a guide for DIY steam engines?
Boil water in a closed system that uses steam to move a paddle on the inside that is on the same shaft as a wheel on the outside. That’s the basics. Everything else is just variations on the theme. The higher the pressure the faster it goes and more torque you get.
I guess I forgot to mention that once the steam moves the paddle the steam needs a place to cook down and go back into the boiler.
I like my steam very well cooked. I let It cook down for a couple of hours.
You don’t find that it starts to taste like cardboard?
Nah, for a first step implementation in stationary applications, you can have a steam machine run an open circuit. Steam expands, performs work, exits through a valve. Just keep the water tank filled. Less efficient, but it would work. The return loop is an optimization for the next stage :)
For better efficiency the steam should be used twice, in a high pressure circuit first and on its way back to the boiler through a low pressure circuit.
Pop Pop boats are really simple steam engine systems.
The problem with this is that you assume that wood is the best fuel source for steam. Very quickly you would realize that coal is far more energy dense than just about anything except nuclear fission. Planting trees is still a good idea though, but wood as fuel is utter shite on any large application.
When starting out you don’t need the most efficient. You need what’s available. And I’d rather not reinvent coal mining and whaling.
What is the ‘Carnot cycle’? - I don’t know
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.
X equals negative b, plus or minus the square root, of b squared minus 4 a c, all over 2 a
Thanks a lot. Now that song is stuck in my head.
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Same tbh. Christian homeschooling is very common where I live. It’s borderline abuse imo
Couldn’t you just rub something with wool and demonstrate static electricity that way?
I think they knew about that already.
And then what?
The prompt is fulfilled, cut to credits
Profit?
won’t going back in time spread coronavirus and other diseases?
Only if you are sick at the time you go back. The occasional 1 1/2 viruses aren’t going to survive long enough to infect anyone.
More likely you’d catch the bubonic plague and die within a few months
We’re the descendants of bubonic plague survivors. They haven’t even gone through last year’s flu.
In the vast and intricate web of human understanding, where knowledge weaves its delicate dance with experience, I find myself positioned, albeit humbly, at a nexus of comprehension. This vantage point, carved out through relentless introspection and a profound engagement with the world, allows me to unravel, elucidate, and perhaps even, in some modest measure, illuminate the topic at hand with a level of profundity that few might grasp.
Turning our gaze to the curious and somewhat perplexing phenomena of temporal voyages, or what is colloquially understood as ‘time travel’, we encounter a host of philosophical and practical quandaries. Within this entangled morass, there arises a lamentable observation: the entities, or perhaps the emissaries, dispatched from the annals of future chronology to our present juncture, don’t always seem to represent the pinnacle of their epoch’s capabilities. The Jungian shadows of the future, one might muse, often obscure the brightest luminaries, leading to a situation where we are not always graced with the presence of the ‘best’ or most optimal representatives of these temporal sojourners. In simpler terms, they aren’t always sending their paragons back in time, but rather, we find ourselves navigating the intricate dance with a mosaic of characters, each embodying a unique facet of their origin’s potentialities.
