What are the skills and knowledge you could actually bring & fully realize at some point in the past?
And we’re taking this in the strictest, nerdiest, materialist lense. I don’t care how smart you are you ain’t making a steam engine the in bronze age, for instance.
So what could you create, with just your knowledge & period tools? What kind of institutional, technological, philosophical innovations could you realistically recreate? How would you interface with the social fabric of society to not be some crazed pariah who never positively influences the place they went?
probably the biggest impact i might be able to pull off would be some kind of irrigation improvement. like wind powered and/or muscle assisted (treadle-style maybe) pumping and storing at some moderate increase in elevation (~4 feet above crops) to a clay sealed pond. something i could pull off at a small scale as a proof of concept and communicate to others through demonstration for a larger scale project. besides slavery and shoulder buckets, flood and furrow was The Show for a long time, but it uses so much goddam water and salinity buildup collapsed whole civilizations. to be able to go deeper, have better flood protection, and build up an elevated reserve that could be more tightly controlled without a ton of labor time would probably be a major game changer in freeing up effort and protecting water resources, not to mention letting people farm reliably further away from rivers that are contested resources.
also, probably something related to plowing. like basically getting people to not do it when it isn’t necessary, to protect top soil instead of just hammer it until it’s gone and dampen the “need” to expand into new lands, find new sources of fertility, etc. probably a lighter footprint plow/more of a cultivator, nitrogen fixing rotations, cover crops and conservation strips to prevent erosion. that might be harder to convince, because the science has been definitive for decades and people still go hard on tillage and absolutely kick the shit out of soils because they think it is cool and makes fields look “tidy”.
the easiest thing that would probably change history would be to go back to pre-antiquity and bring knowledge of the location and size of massive, easily accessible salt deposits and how to navigate there by the stars.
I don’t know how true this is but I think a lot of seafaring cultures didn’t understand how you can sail into the wind (tacking). I mean you could probably go back in time thousands of years and show folks how to add a keel and how to point your sail correctly, no real “tech” needed.
I spent all day reading about early suspensions on carriages and cars - it wasn’t until the 16th century that they figured out you could make the ride smoother by suspending the body of a carriage with leather straps (as opposed to having it be attached directly to the frame), and it wasn’t until the 19th that they figured out that you could make it even smoother with a leaf spring suspension. Leaf springs themselves actually date back to ancient times and can be made of metal or wood depending on what’s available, so it’s just a matter of applying them to a new purpose.
Depending on how far you get sent back, there’s also a lot of very simple improvements you can make to wheels that were technologically possible for a long time before people thought to do it. Make wheels lighter by making them out of thin planks instead of an entire slice of tree trunk, stronger by reinforcing the rim with a metal band, more maneuverable by separating the axle into two sections. Inflatable tires are much harder, but people would use a solid band of rubber or cork around the outside of the wheel to accomplish the same thing before pneumatic tires were figured out.
If you’re doing either of those things, then you’re a stone’s throw away from inventing a bicycle. Just a thought.
If you’re doing either of those things, then you’re a stone’s throw away from inventing a bicycle. Just a thought.
I’d argue it’s in the sense of da vincis first helicopter in that it’s like a fun novelty thing that wouldn’t get realized much, much later as anything but.
It’s sort of a pareto principle thing where 80% of a bicycle is pretty easy to manufacture out of whatever you have lying around and the 20% get nigh impossible without fairly advanced metallurgy I think.
A Balance bike or something like Karl Draisine’s dandy horse is feasible much earlier than it was invented, sure, but that was and would always be a rich people toy since it has very little use other than going zoom zoom for fun.
Sure, frame, wheels and such, sorted, someone just needed to put it together in like bicycle shape or thereabouts.
Drivetrains get pretty complicated though, unless you penny-farthing it you’re gonna need a chain of some sort or it’s just gonna be a novelty again. Sure you could do like leather band around wooden sprockets or some shit but you’re gonna be replacing these so often and they’d require so much craftsmanship you’re back to rich people toy. Without ball bearings and such it’s also gonna be a such a slog to ride it’s going to be pointless.
Once metallurgy is there, though, you could kickstart the fuck out of modern bicycle design by just “inventing” it and a load of other shit that was entirely doable way earlier. People were fucking around for a while there.
Math, some simple tools like 19th century plows, better crop rotation and artificial selection, 17th century and later metallurgy. Basic but useful electricity, a motor can be made from wire and magnets.
Much much better medicine. I can definitely recreate penicillin and gramicidin, ether, basic surgery. I can make small amounts of aluminium, also a map of accessible high yield ore deposits.
Once super rich steam engines and telegraphs and better ships become possible, but the trick is giving people what they actually need and avoiding the “man who came too early” scenario.
Try and turn Napoleon into a Marxist
