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.
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".
A great master plan to prevent climate change, although the industrial revolution will start 2000 years earlier, so I'm not sure it matters
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
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
And don't forget that you need to demonstrate that it's producing a current. Just get a light bulb, right??
Depends on if Ea-nasir was still in business.
Pretty much everyone in this thread needs to go read Ryan North's book "How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler".
https://www.amazon.com/How-Invent-Everything-Survival-Stranded/dp/0735220158/
Or, if you don't have time, just print this out and keep it with you at all times:
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."
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 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
This reminds me of Dara O'Briain's bit about going back in time and thinking you'll impress the greatest minds in history with your future knowledge but it falls apart quickly.
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:
I can't even draw a bike.
Go back in time with a 4th grade science book from 1997 and be a fucking wizard.
You could probably make explosives from manure. Use that to conquer a small community and make yourself the leader. And start a rebellion against the local lord and become the king. Then you have the resources and slaves to find copper and magnets and shit. Problem is the massive language barrier. Their language is just gibberish to us and vice versa.
Then you have the resources and slaves to find... magnets and shit.
They already had magic in the old days though. They used to have to fight dragons and witches and shit back then.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'm impressed at the strength of the guy's upper arm that he's sitting on.
I'd actually be able to teach them how to make it if they have copper and magnets, since I know how to make a simple generator. They'd be SOL on how to use it though, because I don't know how to make something entirely from raw materials that would require electricity. Which means they also wouldn't know I am creating it with the generator... 🤔 Uh... Shit.
This is actually kinda wild to think about and I hadn't considered it before. Making electricity is easy! Using it is actually more complicated.
Just spin a magnet in a copper coil.
BOOM! Electricity.
How do you make a magnet?
Expose molten ferrous metal to ... a magnet.
Welp...
Magnets are created by running an electrical current through a material, so there is no need to have a 'first magnet'. This is happening 'naturally' in the earth core, in the sun, and in other stars. (https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/565245/how-was-the-first-magnet-made)
So you need to look around and find some magic rocks.
Natural magnets, called "lodestones", were found in iron ores (magnetite) from the ancient region of Magnesia, hence the name "Magnet". (https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/615500/how-did-magnets-first-come-about)
Maybe the sword with the stone was just a big lodestone with a sword sized hole in it. Just throwing that out there.
And one more cool fact...
Based on his discovery of an Olmec artifact (a shaped and grooved magnetic bar) in North America, astronomer John Carlson suggests that lodestone may have been used by the Olmec more than a thousand years prior to the Chinese discovery.[23] Carlson speculates that the Olmecs, for astrological or geomantic purposes, used similar artifacts as a directional device, or to orient their temples, the dwellings of the living, or the interments of the dead.[23] Detailed analysis of the Olmec artifact revealed that the "bar" was composed of hematite with titanium lamellae of Fe2–xTixO3 that accounted for the anomalous remanent magnetism of the artifact.[24] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lodestone)
Forget mathematics, logic and philosophy. Teach them about Jeebus and establish a solid patriarchy. After that make a shitload of McDonald's and Facebook.
You'd still probably manage to get by offering services as an accountant. Illiteracy was the norm the world over for most of history, good math understanding was even rarer.
Yeah, but no one gave a shit unless you read Latin. Nobody cared if you could read and write in those weird grunts the Angles and Saxons made.
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?
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