You're going back to 17 August 1888. What do?
You're going back to 17 August 1888. What do?
I'm including !hypotheticalsituations in a game I play with myself sometimes. The bolded parameters were all assigned using a random number generator.
Don't worry about how you were convinced of it, but you know for certain that you will be transported to 17 August 1888 in exactly one week from right now. This is a one-way trip.
Luckily, you will be able to bring some things with you. You will be able to bring back 2 m3/72 ft3 worth of stuff. For reference, that's about what can be stored in the bed of a standard pickup without going over the bedrails. Let's say that you've been provided the appropriate number of steamer trunks to fill.
What are you going to do for the next week, what are you bringing back with you, and what will you do once you arrive?
You may bring people/pets back with you, but you must subtract their approximate dimensions from your baggage allotment. You will arrive in 1888 in the same geographic location that you're in next week.
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Ooh, I love how specific this is with the luggage capacity and the date.
No people or pets to start. There will be plenty of those when I arrive, and while it might be lonely humans are big. Maybe I'd find someone to tag along if I have room.
What I would take:
Adapters to use local electricity. In 1888 electricity exists, and there's a handful of central stations. A solar panel, because they don't have much volume and I can get electricity anywhere that way.
My internet archive disk - which I would quickly update and make a couple copies of. My computer, and some backup computers and parts; enough to last a lifetime. Reference books, which will also cover for where I get the disk information.
Radio equipment. At the very least I could start a radiotelegraphy business with Marconi.
Counterfeits. They don't know about photoshop or digital printers. I'm going with a lot of bearer bonds, passports and other goodies.
Antibiotics and other cheap but unavailable medicines. I get whatever old-timey vaccinations I can too. Modern penicillin spores to grow my own, if I can get that in a week.
At least one period-appropriate outfit. At this point I'm probably running out of cash. I might be able to fit a person as well, I guess I'll look for volunteers. Then, I'll go into a large city for the jump and get on the railroad to New York or Toronto afterwards. Fortune awaits.
You wouldn't necessarily need to worry about the expense of medicines. You know that you're going back in time. You know when it's happening. Like my mom always told me, a little armed robbery strategically planned to occur shortly before permanently disappearing back in time never hurt anybody.
Something I don't think any of us appreciate enough is precisely how strange we are by Victorian standards. I read once that someone from the 1850s could be dropped into the 1950s and still basically get along just fine. All the social institutions and cultural behaviors they're accustomed to still existed almost exactly the way they did in their time. It's just the technology that would give them whiplash.
Alternatively, someone from 1900 getting dropped into 2000 would have far more trouble. Who goes where and who does what is different. Leisure is different. Work is different. Identity is different. It's weird to think about how much fundamental stuff changed course in the last two generations or so.
The author did a way better job at articulating it than I did just now, but the takeaway is that we'd run the risk of being dangerously different in attitude and demeanor. It would manifest in ways outside of our control, too. We just wouldn't fit in. And that's not even taking into consideration the likely experience of BIPOC and queer folks or women. If you're not a white cis dude, you'd better just bring cash money & research hard the part of town you're gonna arrive in.
I know my only hope would be to arrive with loads of banknotes and my method for amassing a degree of wealth being successful. That way I could play off extreme eccentricity without getting committed or strung up.
I read once that someone from the 1850s could be dropped into the 1950s and still basically get along just fine.
That seems exaggerated. Just from what I know there was a lot of clothing evolution during that period (1950s clothes were more like 2020s clothes than 1870s clothes), and things like flush toilets, electricity and mass literacy were introduced. The basic point stands, though.
I'm a cis white dude, so that's squared away. However, one thing that occurs to me is that I have no idea the procedure for boarding a train. Do I need documents? Probably not, fewer people can read. How do I go about finding schedules then? I'm sure there's a whole terminology everyone but me will know. From family stories I know that livestock got on and off with the passengers even in the 20th century, I have no idea how that would have been managed.
When I get there, how do I sell my counterfeits? I don't know any shibboleths if I need to get into a gentleman's area, all I have is looking white and sounding American. If I raise too much suspicion, every culture has a euphemism for a bribe, but my own culture's has been lost somewhere on the way to me, I will miss it if someone asks.
My saving grace is that nobody's going to expect a time traveler. I'll just seem like an aggressively odd man who doesn't know obvious things. Maybe they'll suspect I'm drunk or something, which could be an issue early on as my area was then under prohibition, but that's nothing that can't be worked out.
The thing about the time traveler going to 1950 vs 2000 was primarily about culture shock. I was an anthropology undergrad (archaeology, actually, but that's a square/rectangle distinction), and it was from an article explaining how incredibly slow cultureal norms change, and how unique the 1950s through 1990s were in terms of widespread cultural change. A human can more or less wrap their head around some wild new technology that seems like literal magic at first, but even a slightly different social order causes significant cognitive distress. Interesting stuff imo.
Similar to your train thing, one of the times I did this exercise by myself I wound up spending like 3 hours researching how people secured lodging in the 1700s. When arriving in a new place, how does short term room & board work? How do public house bathrooms work? Where and how do I feed myself? How hard is it to buy land or a house? I ended up reading a bunch of old newspapers and put together. whole shtick/cover story that I'd stick to so I could [hopefully] get away with being a complete dumbass for a while as I get my bearings.
Oh yeah, the culture and ideology was totally different. I have family connections to poorer countries, though, and I've read a ton of history and anthropology (still obviously less than you), so I feel like I could figure it out pretty quickly. It would be lonely and upsetting, but I could find some radicals to hang out and shoot the shit with eventually.
AskHistorians on Reddit has "ordinary life" questions every once in a while, and it really comes through how there was totally different systems of commerce set up even in the early 20th century.
Oh, and I forgot.
You wouldn’t necessarily need to worry about the expense of medicines. You know that you’re going back in time. You know when it’s happening. Like my mom always told me, a little armed robbery strategically planned to occur shortly before permanently disappearing back in time never hurt anybody.
That's true! If it's just a week and I'm not coming back I could just shoplift most of this stuff. Hmm, I wonder if there's something ordinary that's gone down in price a lot.