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 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."
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The deconstruction I didn't know I needed
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
If you want to get stuff going, what you have to do is help past people produce precision tools. Then you can build interesting machines and make use of electricity.
Just bring a Machinery's Handbook with you and you will be a god.
Oh you mean the stuff that comes from electrum? We got that…
When was the water wheel invented? pretty much everyone know how they work.
