Okay, first of all, 200 years ago was 1826, so why are we looking at a pic of cave men? They already had working telegraph machines in 1826. So, no, they aren’t going to be that confused by the concept of electricity.
Secondly, don’t sell yourself too short. Just knowing that washing your hands prevents the spread of disease could be a big benefit.
And thirdly, don’t revel in your ignorance – go out and learn some shit! You’ve got the entire internet at your fingertips right now. If you don’t know how electricity works, go learn how electricity works. You can do it right now. Seriously, close social media and search for “how does electricity work”.
Secondly, don’t sell yourself too short. Just knowing that washing your hands prevents the spread of disease could be a big benefit.
Or, more than likely, it’ll get you killed. The earliest proponents of germ theory weren’t really treated the best.
i think killed is a bit over the top, more like severely ridiculed and excluded.
Boil water, spin fancy rock
Exactly. All you need to know about power generation is that it is simply boiling water.
Ugnug boil water. Ugnug no see electricity. Ugnug say future man is bullshit.
Ugnug sees steam. Ugnug forgot that steam turns wheel. Wheel turns. Ugnug sees future man use tiny lightning to join two pieces of metal together. Ugnug believes future man can do something that Ugnug cannot.
So tell me how you do it? I’m just testing you. I already know how.
How you … wash your hands?
I knew you didn’t know 😂
I was actually thinking of the pic asking about electricity, but I get the question
Almost oft le it’s a shitpost or something
200 years isn’t that long ago, but call it 2,000 years: If you go back with at least a cursory grasp of the scientific method, that might be enough to get things up and running, if not for you then for the more intelligent and scientifically-minded types around you. “Try to prove yourself wrong at every step of the process” isn’t a natural impulse for most of us, but once taught and understood, it changes the game.
You could also drop a few tantalising nuggets even if you don’t know what they mean:
- E=MC2
- Basic concept of evolution by natural selection
- Germ theory of disease
- Electromagnetism
- Lenses for microscopy and telescopy, using the same lenses to start fires with the sun
- Electrical conductivity of different materials (e.g. metal good, wool bad)
- The basic components of a battery
- Newton’s first few laws
- Radio waves
- Calculus
- Periodic table of elements
Those are all things you can read about in any library, so you could do a crash course and memorise the broad strokes or write them down, or just take the books with you if that’s allowed.
If it were me, however, I’d just instantly kill myself.
I’d say the only thing you need to get electricity started is a civilization with sufficiently ready access to copper and lodestone that they’re not luxury materials.
If you plop out in egypt or rome you can totally do it, it’ll just be a matter of convincing people to let you try.
Get some copper wire, some flat-ish bits of lodestone, and follow this: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Simple-Electric-Generator Then you crank that soulja boy and find some way to show off the electricity, maybe just have it arc between the wire ends or make a frog leg twitch or something (assuming that doesn’t just horrify people). Or just make two of this setup and wire them to each other, so you can show that spinning one end makes the other end spin as well.Hopefully that’ll make some people go “oh shit what if…”
Adding to this, Alessandro Volto invented the voltaic pile, the first true electric battery, in 1793, 233 years ago. Faraday invented the first electric motor in 1820. Neither built these entirely if their own creation, like all science they built them on the theories, discoveries, and work of those who came before. They progressed the application of all that knowledge into one new effort and are remembered because their creations took the process to the next level with inventions that reliably produced the intended outcome repeatedly.
While the average modern person couldn’t built either of those from scratch even if the knowledge is accessible to them, it’s also not like most people 200 years ago were sitting around a fire in animal skins. There’s not that big of a gap in how most people live now and lived 200 years ago compared to 50,000 years ago.
1826 sure looked primitive.
Strong disagree.
Put a guy back 200 years ago with the concept of things to come and let the great thinker of the time stand on the shoulders of an Everyman from today, we would be at least a hundred years ahead of where we are currently.
There were some very intelligent people back then who just didn’t know the rules of the game they were playing. They had to figure out the rules so future inventors could build off of them.
Go back 200 years and say “everything is made of things from the periodic table, it has rows and columns” and you instantly revolutionize chemistry. If you know of acids and bases you’re even further along. There are ways to communicate long distances without using sounds or visible light, boom twenty years later I guarantee someone will have figured it out, it’s terribly obvious once you know it’s possible, but why would you assume invisible communication is possible since it’s so outlandish to our seemingly natural everyday rules?
The only thing you need to do is survive being proclaimed a heretic, you need to get open minded thinkers to hear you, because the closed mindedness was even more entrenched in society than it is today.
There are ways to communicate long distances without using sounds or visible light
Somebody in 1826: “No shit, dumbass. It’s called a telegraph.”
Credibility is your biggest challenge, if you go back and inhabit a big name thinker’s body you’ll accomplish things, if you go back as an outcast stranger who appeared in the woods one day, you’re probably going to die in a cell somewhere, or just of exposure, before you get anyone’s serious attention about “what makes up everything.”
Reminds me of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
you’re not completely incorrect, but you seem to have a very pop-sci picture of how the past worked.
If you suddenly appeared in the forest one day it’s AFAIK perfectly possible that people would treat you as any immigrant, just go down to the church and get registered and everything will be just dandy so long as you can do some sort of work.
Weren’t there anti-vagrant and anti-spy laws?
i’m not quite sure how that would work since pilgrimages and other long-distance travel was pretty normal, and there was no way to transfer information faster than said travel (especially not just to get papers on a random pilgrim).
Gdamn it! Is everything I read the past decade just disinformation?
when it comes to history a good rule of thumb is that anything mainstream is complete nonsense, just actually made up.
I don’t know. I have to ask those puppy girls if they would make an exception for a male pet. I’m tired, boss.
You’d speak practically a different form of English, you’d be unprepared for virtually every modern day hardship, you’d be unskilled at gaining resources and being gainfully employed. I think after about 3 days of interacting with people, they’d get really spooked by you, and that would be that.
put lemon juice in shiny metal you found in cave put lot of it 5 lemons juice take shiny metal string attach to eachother make big big fire
wash hand in fire boiled river water and do surgery with washed hand and washed utensil
you know how make beer? ok now put hands and tool in beer when surgery
dirty hand cause death .
Alcohol in beer isn’t strong enough to disinfect. Don’t dip your surgical tool is beer.
make very strong beer. ferment longer
I don’t think you can do it with beer. The yeast used dies from the alcohol they produce. I’m sure there is nasty bacteria that can survive in concentrations of alcohol above what yeast can.
You could make vodka, or moonshine, but that requires distillation and is a more advanced tech.
Soap (made from animal fat) and water should do fine for your hands. Use a fire to disinfect any tools before you use them (let them cool off first). That should majorly help with survival.
Lemon juice will be a problem. You’ll have to make lemons first.
excuse me lime juice
make sail make big wind attach to wood bring supplies then bring lemon
to make lemon at home no colonization breed oranges with other plants see results
I know about germs and the importance of cleanliness; I also know about what ACTUALLY caused the plague
Also while Alexander the great was himself from so long ago, he’s apparently attributed with having been the first to invent tactics, so if I go further back I can be the first to engineer tactics myself
If I go far enough back in Egypt, I’m scratching out messages in English in pyramids to really mess with archaeologists thousands of years down the line
Many physicians tried to promote hygiene and were laughed out the park, nobody believed them. Apart from the correct idea, you also need to be able to convince people and it’s not that easy
Depending on the precise time period, i wonder if you could manage it by using scented soap and insisting that people get sick because the surgeon’s hands smell bad.
Actually, inventing writing and a phonetic alphabet would be pretty incredible.
Good job on that last one
200y ago electricity was already a known thing, though not something you got home yet.
One thing you could do, however, is buy up “worthless” land around the Middle East for when oil starts being drilled
Your biggest issue with tech, even if you know how to make it, is getting the materials.
Everyone tends to forget the tools to make the tools to make the tools to make tools precise enough for half the shit we make. Or consistent enough. There’s alot of steps between sticks stones and fire to pretty much anything today.
Sure you don’t need an industrial revolution for ALOT of stuff. But hot damn are you gonna run into issues without it, eventually
which is why you should learn about medieval technology, that’s something you can generally make from scratch with a team of workers.
Yeah if you only have stone tools it’ll probably be shitty, but a shitty waterwheel that spins a shitty lathe is still plenty useful. It’s kind of nuts how much luxury you can get in no time at all if you just know what’s possible to make.
Use shitty waterwheel to make less shitty waterwheel
Chalk burning and stuff?
Magnets and some copper wires baby! How do we mine up and create these wires and magnets? Lol we’re so boned. (Actually I’ve watched enough primitive technology vids that I might be able to resolve that one too!)
Real talk I actually think it’s not a horrible idea to have like… a book on how to do permaculture on hand. While I doubt being sent back in time will happen, society collapsing enough that knowing how to sustainably farm food is actually a distant possibility. More than likely you’ll be dead in that scenario anyways
copper would be the main problem, because there’s a reason “cuprous” is basically the same word as “cyprus”…
Ironically iron is much easier to get your hands on than copper, it just requires some knowledge to turn into something useful. With copper you can just find it in a cliff if you’re lucky, yank that out and hammer it into shape with a rock.
I know how electricity works, but without any technology more advanced than flint tools I’m gonna just have to go with “magic.”
You go fire - > kiln - > charcoal - > furnace - > steel and copper - > permanent magnets - > electric motor.
The tricky thing is that you need a naturally occurring magnet (lodestone) to make the first steel magnet. If you happen to have a magnet on you you can do heat treatment of the steel, rub the magnet to align the atoms and get yourself a better magnet.
After you got the electric motor you both have a generator and a motor easy peasy.
I died of simple infection while building the kiln. No antibiotics.
Moldy bread.
Pretty sure you can’t just eat mouldy bread and be cured of your infection. You have to isolate and multiply it.
Actually, you just slap it on the wound.
You can use chemical batteries to create electric current without magnets.
You can also create weak permanent magnets by just hitting iron with a hammer.
Looked it up, this looks the easiest to tech up. You still have to heat it up to a dark red color, align it north to south and then hammer. It uses the earth’s magnetic field to magnetise.
Then tech up to stronger steel magnets.
So you have any idea how hard it is to make wire consistent enough to make the windings? There’s a reason that wire wasn’t really a thing until the 1700s at the earliest.
The wire part of that isn’t trivial. They were pulling wires in the middle ages for holding armor together, but high volume and specialization didn’t come until the Renaissance. Good insulation pretty much requires plastics. Wax could be used before that but it’s not as good. Your early motors will have shorts that reduce power or kill it entirely.
Well yeah, definitely not practical to do it with zero tech, a water wheel is better in most cases. Even a bike with gears for an unmovable drill is nice.
But the electric motor can tech up some interesting chemistry later on.
You forgot the water. You need water to boil.
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You would at least know about penicillin, germ theory, how cells work, and about atoms. So much theory and philosophy would be skipped, for better or worse.
Good luck proving it, strange screaming man on the corner with no viable preindustrial skills
you have seen my comments how exactly is that different from me now
i would keep soap secrets to myself and my little community of pseudoimmortal hogfat renderer
That’s one thing that’s kinda bothers me a little bit in animes (Isekais).Like who the fuck knows exactly the chemical process on how to make everything and how every details gets done just by giving a vague description of something they only heard of.
Assuming I did know anything about advanced productive processes, how would I convince anyone to give me resources to demonstrate them?
just predict the next lunar cycles for like a month
Not sure if srs
srs
couldn’t you just save up and buy them?
I spend way too much time thinking about this very topic.
I think I am somewhat well informed, so I’ve been thinking how well I would do in different eras. Of course in these scenarios I assume I can learn the language and communicate with the people of the past.
Anyway, I came to the conclusion than apart from some very specific advances, I’d do very badly. The vast majority of technological discoveries require an already well established base of knowledge and a society to carry it. You can’t singlehandedly kickstart the agrarian revolution early, it requires generations of plant knowledge. Same goes for stuff like metalworking, unless you can easily find soft metal ore and build a furnace out of primitive materials, you are boned - I could maaaaybe find iron ore in certain places, and maaaaaybe build a very basic bloomery, but at that level (amount of material and labor) it’s next to useless, unless I somehow get everybody to blindly follow my vision.
And it just follows like that, for ages on. Maybe I could get something like electricity going a hundred or two hundred years early (I know how to make a rudimentary magnet, or we could use a lodestone. With access to copper and other metals, I can work my way up. But sadlly, I know almost nothing about chemistry which was extremely important for early electric science), but that’s only if there is any actual interest for it - and I don’t really think there would be a lot of it back then, the main use would just be lighting for lords and rich people.
So, in the end, it turns out development IS kinda dependant on material conditions.
The biggest thing an average person might introduce is something like germ theory, which could be pretty massive - but in order to get people to take your advice of washing hands and boiling water seriously, you would have to rise through the ranks of the medical establishment as it exists, which depending on time and place probably means climbing the ladder of whatever is the dominant religious institution. Only after decades of accruing social capital would you have any hope of being seen as anything but one of about a million cranks with your wild and untestable theory of “tiny animals that can’t be seen”.
The genius of a Séguin, a Mayer, a Grove, has certainly done more to launch industry in new directions than all the capitalists in the world. But men of genius are themselves the children of industry as well as of science. Not until thousands of steam-engines had been working for years before all eyes, constantly transforming heat into dynamic force, and this force into sound, light, and electricity, could the insight of genius proclaim the mechanical origin and the unity of the physical forces. And if we, children of the nineteenth century, have at last grasped this idea, if we know now how to apply it, it is again because daily experience has prepared the way. The thinkers of the eighteenth century saw and declared it, but the idea remained undeveloped, because the eighteenth century had not grown up like ours, side by side with the steam-engine. Imagine the decades that might have passed while we remained in ignorance of this law, which has revolutionized modern industry, had Watt not found at Soho skilled workmen to embody his ideas in metal, bringing all the parts of his engine to perfection, so that steam, pent in a complete mechanism, and rendered more docile than a horse, more manageable than water, became at last the very soul of modern industry.
Every machine has had the same history — a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.
Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle — all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.
- conquest of bread
