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.
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.
1826 sure looked primitive.
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
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
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?
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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Spin a copper wire between 2 magnets
Okay. Make a copper wire. Make a magnet.
Are you saying copper wire and magnets weren’t a thing 100 years ago? Ørsted discovered that electrical fields can affect a compass needle in 1820.
Even thousands of years ago, you can find native copper in some places. If you’re lucky this isn’t that hard. Also, I’m not certain on the properties required, but I think you just need a decent conductor, not copper specifically. Copper is just conductive, pretty available, and easy to work with. Also, there are naturally forming magnets. You don’t need to make one.
Magnets exist naturally as lodestone, copper has been readily available since, you know, the copper age.
Yeah making it into wire isn’t trivial but someone around you can fuckin figure that bit out.
My only issue is turning spinning into power. I know we need spinning, and spinning is easy. Water mills are a thing and have been for ages.
if you transported me 200 years in the past, i would just go to turkey and enjoy steam powered kebab. dudes knew what was up
Don’t forget having tea from the Turkish Combustion Kettle!
(Not AI :3)
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.
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
Same with 20000 years
Idk about that. Inventing pottery, agriculture, and permanent structures seems pretty easy even for an idiot of our time.
Nomadic hunter/gatherers probably would have known how to make pottery and permanent structures – they just chose not to, because pottery is generally too heavy and fragile to haul along on long nomadic journeys, and permanent structures are a waste of time and effort if you’re not going to live there permanently.
Really, agriculture is the key to making pottery and permanent structures practical.
But you might not find agriculture to be as easy as you’d think, especially if you’re not already an experienced farmer/gardener. Subsistence farming can be tricky and risky at the best of times, and those are not the best of times. You’ll have several challenges to inventing agriculture:
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Modern domesticated crops haven’t been domesticated yet. Which means you’re stuck cultivating the shitty wild versions, which generally have much lower crop yields. Eventually you could begin domesticating crops yourself, but that takes many years, and you’ve got to eat in the meantime. Most animals haven’t been domesticated yet, either, so if you’re trying to raise animals, you’re going to be dealing with smaller, leaner ones that are more difficult to handle and control.
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No weather forecasts or almanacs to work from. It will probably take you a few years just to get a good feel for the local weather patterns (which may be different back in that time than they are now). Which means a higher chance of crop failures due to unexpected bad weather.
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Wild animals haven’t been decimated as much yet, which means you’re more likely to have problems with wild animals eating your crops before you can harvest them. (You’ll also need to spend a lot of time making pottery, to keep wild animals – especially rodents – out of your crops after you harvest them.)
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You don’t have modern fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Fertilizer can be locally made easily enough (though it still won’t be as good as the processed modern stuff). But your only substitute for herbicides will be to laboriously go out there and manually remove weeds. And the lack of pesticides might really hurt you if you’re unlucky enough to get a bad infestation and bugs eat all of your crops. A swarm of locusts rolling through at the wrong time could doom you to starvation.
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You may have difficulty fending off other hunter/gatherer tribes who have no concept of land ownership and see your crops as just more wild plants to gather and eat whenever they want. And if you try to stop them from doing that, you might end up looking down the pointy end of a pointy stick.
Especially when first getting started, before you’ve managed to create a stockpile to fall back on, just one or two failed crops – for any of the reasons listed above, or for a dozen other reasons – could mean starvation and death in the winter. Inventing agriculture isn’t as simple as just having the idea of ‘Hey, let’s stay in one spot and grow stuff there.’ It’s an entire system that needs to be set up. And it’s a system that will be very fragile in the beginning, when you haven’t yet had a chance to build up a stockpile that could carry you through bad years.
If, like in the picture, you got accepted into a tribe, you could work incrementally while following along their migration path.
Everywhere the tribe typically sets up a camp, dig a cache and store tools, non-perishable food, pottery, etc. there. You can even purposefully plant seeds for edible plants around those areas where they might have a chance to grow on their own.
It’s true we won’t have mass production crops and most grains are going to be tiny at this point in time, but the plants will be hardy. If they grow in an area naturally, chances are they’ll grow there if you pamper them a little too. You can even start domesticating plants this way by purposefully planting the seeds of the better fruit in better places or weeding out the undesireable ones.
Assuming the tribe follows a regular migratory pattern every year or follows it closely enough, you can slowly build up the caches and natural resources every year.
If you can show off how useful it is to have stored stuff, the other members of the tribe might start assisting you which would allow for better production. Fermenting food while you’re away seems like a good way to show off the usefulness of pottery.
You can also build the walls and floor of some basic dry-stone structures as you go along the route without immediately using them. Seeing how they’ve fallen apart by the time you make it back would also give you insight into how bad the weather gets or if there are destructive tribes who also frequent this area.
Once you have enough supplies to hold you through winter at one of the cache sites and a basic permanent shelter, you decide to stay there through winter.
When your tribe comes back around and finds you still alive, I’m sure some will probably want to stick around with you. Et voilà, you have a somewhat permanent settlement.
Viola ≠ voila
Thanks, auto correct doesn’t like French apparently because I swear I typed the accent too
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“the fuck we do with this shit? We don’t stay in one place so long. Fuck off”
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