There’s a book called How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler that covers this stuff. Don’t think it’s comprehensive enough to actually invent everything from scratch, but still a fun read.
By Ryan North, the author of Dinosaur Comics! He based the book on a time travel survival guide he published and made into a T-shirt.
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”.
A great master plan to prevent climate change, although the industrial revolution will start 2000 years earlier, so I’m not sure it matters
I read they knew about steam power for a long time but couldn’t make the engines / containers / doohickies strong enough to contain the pressure.
That’s true, it was cannon technology that allowed steam engines to be created
Yes, electricity would be magic for medieval (and prior) people. Spells trouble for you.
But no, Steam… the principle was known and seldom used by ancient greeces and egypts already, but they couldn’t really utilize it, because metallurgy wasn’t there yet.
And Sahara was almost green 1000+ years ago, lots of oases.
Boil water in a closed system that uses steam to move a paddle on the inside that is on the same shaft as a wheel on the outside. That’s the basics. Everything else is just variations on the theme. The higher the pressure the faster it goes and more torque you get.
I guess I forgot to mention that once the steam moves the paddle the steam needs a place to cook down and go back into the boiler.
Go to steam power first. It can move things
They had steam power over 2000 years ago, they used it in temples and as toys to amuse the rich.
Slaves could move things, and were much cheaper.
They had no incentive to use it any better.
Without a printing press, which would increase the levels of literacy, and allow sharing knowledge orders of magnitude faster, there was no indication that a kettle could ever outperform a hundred men or a few dozen horses.
The problem with this is that you assume that wood is the best fuel source for steam. Very quickly you would realize that coal is far more energy dense than just about anything except nuclear fission. Planting trees is still a good idea though, but wood as fuel is utter shite on any large application.
Electricity is easy to make though… a couple magnets and some copper wire.
they’d probably have non-shitty copper by then, but magnets? thems witchcraft
And don’t forget that you need to demonstrate that it’s producing a current. Just get a light bulb, right??
Probably easier to use a lemon and copper plates. Not sure what you’d connect to it though
You can literally mine lodestone and copper. Ancient people have mined those two things since antiquity. Where do you think it comes from now? Fairies?
You can induce voltage on more than just copper you know. Or maybe you don’t know. You probably don’t know.
Ever wonder why it goes bronze age and then iron age? It’s because it’s a minor miracle humanity discovered how to smelt iron. Iron requires temperatures higher than you can achieve with just wood. Iron absorbs carbon and sulfur making it worthless (in the wrong mixtures).
The process is complex and resource intensive.
Assuming a bronze age civilization, copper or tin is the best you can hope for. Finding a magnet is going to be difficult because there’s not really ferromagnetic materials available. In the modern era the most common material is iron.
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.”
Aren’t you thinking of the floov compensation harpon? People typically get them confused.
Nah, it’s floon, the “n” stands for non-“v” which is definitely what you want if you wanna know where you’re teleporting too…
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:
My biggest issue with this is the flight part - it’s a counterintuitive explanation that doesn’t really explain how to make the flight work. It’s not technically wrong, and if you trace that cross-section you will get a working aerofoil. However, you can’t make the Wright Flyer on that explanation, or in fact any of the early aeroplanes that were constructed with simple fabric stretched between wooden frames.
A far more useful and intuitive explanation is that planes fly by flow-turning, basically the interaction between the aerofoil and the air turns the air in one direction, which pushes the aerofoil in the other. This also means the air below will end up slower than the air on top, which will create a pressure differential. Either of these methods can completely describe how flight works.
Also, a plane isn’t just two aerofoils attached to a central body. Early planes were at least biplanes, and you need horizontal and vertical stabilisers to have full control. You need flaps that give you pitch, yaw and roll, and you need the centre-of-mass - the point where it balances - to be in front of the centre of pressure. That means you need the stabilisers to be at the back to keep the plane stable like a dart.
This isn’t just a “well akshually”, although it sort of is. If you tried to follow the advice as-written and didn’t know this, there’s a good chance you’d end up on the long list of people killed by their own inventions. Actually, I suspect most of these explanations give you just enough information to kill yourself but not really enough to actually make any of them work from first principles.
