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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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:
- lighting with a simple air filled carbon filament light bulb.
- metallurgy with an induction heater.
- fumeless heating with a crude convection heater although this one might be more of a stretch.
edit: I wrote this without consulting any external ressources as it would be cheating.
jokes on you, I watched dr stone
