I think it would actually be easier to wow people than people think. You’d just have to focus on older technology rather than completely modern stuff. If you know that steam engines are a thing, and even vaguely how they work, you can build the king a pump to get running water without having to run massive aqueducts, or a crane to build his massive projects, or any number of directly useful things. An understanding of basic germ theory could set you up to be the best doctor in the world. Or even just a bicycle would probably be quite useful to get around without a horse, and I’m sure anyone could make a rough mockup of a bike.
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 don’t want to type out that thing you said, because I don’t want to end up on a list, but idk how to do that.
The Anarchist Cookbook can show you the way.
And all the germs we carry to which we’re already immune.
They’d actually kill off any would be time traveling conqueror pretty quickly with smallpox.
Definitely take your smallpox vaccine before time traveling. They still make them, so it shouldn’t be too much hassle.
Electricity is easy to make though… a couple magnets and some copper wire.
Easy materials to get from your local 1st century hardware store
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.
Any conclusive proof that this was used to produce electricity? Consensus seems to be that it wasn’t.
No conclusive proof. It didn’t have a passthrough for one electrode of the two. It did have remains of acid inside and corrosion on the electrodes. One can speculate whether it was an experimental device, a faulty device or something else entirely (one alchemist trying to replicate another’s secrets and doing it wrong?).
To add insult to the injury, it was lost or stolen during the war in 2003, so more analysis can’t be done until it gets re-discovered. :o
I haven’t heard an alternative hypothesis, though… I try to imagine what else besides electrochemistry would one do with two dissimilar metals in an acid. It ruins the metals, it doesn’t make any known medicine or effective poison, it likely fouls the jug too… for a person to put copper and iron into a jug full of acid, there has to be a reason for doing it…
