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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
People are linking good guides to inventing the important stuff, but you should also know that you can download wikipedia. The text-only English snapshot as of 2025-03-01 was 25 GB, so fairly reasonable to include on a flash drive, laptop, or phone. Just make sure you charge your device before time travelling.
The truth is, you aren't any smarter than people of the past, you just know different things.
What I DO know, is that there's a dude in United States army camo in awe of this time traveler. So I am quite interested in what's going on in the plot of this picture
That's why I wrote this:
You made this? That's awesome!
It's been cycling through my PC's wallpaper folder for years. I always seem to read something new when it pops up again.
I didn't exactly make this, but I TOOK THE CREDIT.
Edit: I had a feeling Ryan North wrote this and just managed to confirm it. He apparently also published a whole book based on this concept, which will likely be a great read.
This is awesome, thanks for putting in the effort!
Quick edit: do I credit you as /u/klear or do you prefer another handle?
Don't credit me. TAKE THE CREDIT.
No way in hell.
Good content deserves credit.
See my reply to The Picard Maneuver above if you must then.
So credit goes to Ryan North then.
Thanks for the info, I might even get the book \o
A copper coil, a magnet, and a repetitive source of motion is not that hard. You'd have to go really far back not to have access to a mill, and even if you did, it wouldn't be that hard to invent a hand crank. The question is how you make the electricity useful. I think a simple heating element is probably the best option. Show them the river cooking their food, and the benefits should be obvious
It won't take too long for them to invent the porn machine.
Rotating slide projector is also an easy one 😉
That's the first thing I'd teach them so I won't be lynched for being a witch!
Go out in the wild and find me a magnet and copper coil. Crafting the materials is the hard part. You would fare better creating the first batteries.
Copper is very ductile and has a low melting point. Making a crude wire isn't that hard. Oiled fabric is good enough to insulate it.
Finding a permanent magnet would be hard but you don't need one. A simple salt/acid battery is enough to make a temporary one and use it as your generator's rotor.
Depending on what metals you have at hand, a lead/acid battery is quite easy to make. It would require some light chemistry skills to make an acid that's strong enough though. My best bet would be concentrating ethanoic acid.
Your battery only needs to act as an exciter. Once the generator is running you can use some of the current it produces to keep the rotor excited.
Once you got your generator assembled you can just hook it up on a water mill which the greeks knew about. You could maybe even fiddle around using late ancient Greek knowledge about steam engines (see aeolipile) and make yourself a very simple steam turbine.
With a bit of metallurgy know how you can make a DC generator like the ones used in the late 19th and early 20th century. All the materials you would need have been available since antiquity.
An AC generator would be a tad harder to make but not by a huge margin.
It wouldn't be efficient at all but imho it would be a good PoC and you could then pool up some knowledge and brain power from people around you.
The hardest part might be convincing folks around you that it's actually more than a party trick.
I currently have three practical ideas that are quite easy to set up:
edit: I wrote this without consulting any external ressources as it would be cheating.
If I'm coming back before the iron age, electricity isn't my biggest concern. All you need for a magnet is two pieces of iron to rub together, and copper is one of the easiest to work metals on Earth. Indigenous people here in Michigan were mining and working copper over 6000 years ago. Your dynamo doesn't need to be good, it just has to prove the concept.
Tbf, I sincerely hope a lot of you understand the basic concept of a gearbox. Depending on how far back you go, a water wheel might be a pretty massive leap forward, and it might at least inspire other, smarter people of the time to work on theories of energy, and eventually electricity.
I would just bring an e-reader preloaded with Wikipedia and a solar charger. It would be treated as a relic for millennia long after it stopped working and would probably cause a collapse in the time-space continuum, but that’s just how I roll. 😎
You definitely end up changing the nature of today's religious environment.
Bullshit, it will get axed by a fanatical zewlot at first sign of denying god xD
Were that guaranteed we'd be worshipping gods from before the Greeks.
If you can research how to make the original microscopes, bringing an understanding of virology would be hugely impactful.
Honestly, you don't even have to go that far. Just bringing back germ theory would massively advance the health and safety of ancient peoples. You might get a little bit of pushback trying to explain it to them though.
Germ theory was around for a long time before it was adopted because no one believed it.
Hello, it’s me from 2025. When are you from where germ theory is finally believed and acted upon by the majority?
People don't poop in their drinking water, it's an improvement.
Not in the 2025 I’m from! https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-epa-san-francisco-sewage-discharge/
Viewing a virus with a microscope would be quite something.
Is the study of bacteria called something else? I guess just germ theory.
Viruses are extremely small compared to bactria. They typically can't be resolved optically. The study of micro organisms would be microbiology if you want to be broad.
I've seen enough isekai anime to know the way to make money is to show people clear glass, soap and the thing to pull water from a well without a manual bucket.
Oh for sure. I'm ready in case they pick me to go back in time and push human technology forward.
You might think it's a bunch of formulas like V = W / Q and V = I × R and all that junk
But no
Erase math from your mind for only a moment
Ionic Compounds molecules have charges, you have negatively charged anions and positively charged cations. This stuff exists everywhere: NH+, O-, Ag+, etc. Best way to identify them is to first set up a periodic table, probably pretty difficult for a layman to remember the rules, and then you can test to identify materials placement on the table with flame tests (different metals burn a different color when placed in a flame). Positive materials or the positive end of a polarized material are commonly referred to as Cathodes, and negatives are Anodes.
Magnetism is important, but you don't need to know about the specifics of electron valence or orbitals to understand electricity. Magnets are naturally occurring and you can make most ferrous metals into magnets just by heating them to their curie point or by hitting or stroking them.
Once you have some copper, a magnet, and some positively (P) and negatively (N) charged materials you can set up some simple circuits. The materials can be oriented in large PN junctions to work as batteries, in small PN junctions to work as diodes which control the direction of flow of electricity, and in small PNP junctions with a glass plate at the end to create Light Emitting Diodes. Small capacitors can also be made with metallic conductive material sheets layered with non conductive dialectic components like glass or paper.
One of the earliest and most common battery formulas would be Lead Acid batteries. By layering Lead Dioxide as a Cathode and solid metal Lead as an Anode in an Electrolyte solution, ideally 1.25 to 1.28 kg of sulfur per liter of water makes a good battery acid. You can create sulfuric acid by burning naturally occurring sulfur and directing the resulting gasses into a container of water.
Once you have your rechargeable battery, you can charge it by spinning a magnet around inside of big coil of copper wire attached to the positive and negative end of your battery. The copper has its own electromagnetic field through which electron excitation is dispersed, and by moving the magnetic field of the copper with your magnet's magnetic field you're inducing flow through the copper in a specific direction.
I'm not going to get into the details of Alternating vs Direct currents, but I will add the concept of a Transformer which is where you place two conductive and charged materials in close proximity allowing it to Arc and jump over on its own, which would naturally convert AC to DC, useful in current cleaning and regulation.
Congratulations, you've just brought turbines, lights, batteries and electric engines to Rome. Now, kindly return to your present to promptly discover the horrible eternal empire you've created and suffer the rest of your meaningless peasant life.
If I get sent back I'm bring this person
I loved how they laid that out all matter of fact like, as if I had any idea WTF they were talking about. Definitely a case of:
That's true for my field, behavior analysis, but in fairness to us, the laypeople also overestimate their knowledge of my field.
jokes on you, I watched dr stone
Dr. Stone is just SO GOOD.
While I have a basic understanding of using magnets and wires for motors/generators, I think an easier option would instead be a Van de Graaff generator.
Then probably get executed for witchcraft or just ignored as a lunatic for speaking in a strange foreign tongue.
Now I'm wondering how the first coil was made, because that doesn't seem like a job for a forge
you make a wire, you coil the wire
I think my go-to invention would be some kind of bicycle or something that uses a similar mechanism
If you accept a lack of gears, a belt drive instead of a chain probably simplifies the most difficult part of actually making it. Best pick somewhere with good roads though, since you're definitely not making pneumatic tyres or a pump to fill them with
Shaft-drive bicycles are a thing too. That might be easier for an ancient blacksmith to tackle?
Edit: or to at least get a proof of concept you could bypass the whole torque-transmission issue by building a penny-farthing
After that take this rock and show me how you taught it to do maths