Fools as i carry with me all of human knowledge, right here in this fragile tiny black slab. I can tell you all once you tell me what your wifi password is.
pretty sure you can just use wood or whatever for the lettering, sure it might be kinda shit and tend to break but it should work. having to make new letter stamps every now and then is better than painstakingly writing every letter for hand.
Not to mention inventing an alphabet depending on where and when you go to. Or you could go with ConstantScript if you feel like being a gigantic troll.
Abugida might be workable if you reform it so that vowel markers can only appear above or below the modified consonant.
This book
Tells you how to handle this, along with everything else you need to know to rebuild all systems in society from scratch should there be some sort of time machine based accident. It’s a good read!
There's also [The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch](!wiki The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch) by Lewis Dartnel. Great book
Let's see... electricity in a preindustrial environment. You'll get into Factorio levels of invent a tool to make a tool to make a tool...
Copper wire existed at the time, (depending on the time period) but drawing it involved a person on a swing pulling it through a hole in a metal plate. So we need a metal plate. Surely there is a town blacksmith? We will need a few plates with gradually decreasing hole diameter. Enough wire for a demonstration would be difficult and expensive, but not impossible. Could also use copper busbars instead of wire.
Now that we have conductors, we have to figure out what method of generation we want. Rather than trying to make bearings, balanced shafts, and stacks of thin metal plates all identical and radially symmetrical so we can make a generator, we should first attempt a battery. For this we can get away with stacks of two dissimilar metals in a glass or ceramic jar, bathed in some sulfuric acid. Aqua Regia was a mixture of nitric acid and sulfuric acid, but it might dissolve copper and zinc plates. Could also use lead plates, those are easier to hammer out flat. With this we could get an output around 2v per cell, put a half dozen of them together in series and one could build a simple arc lamp.
After the proof of concept demonstration, hopefully you'd interest more smiths in the project, increasing your talent pool. With some mercury and wire you could build a version of Faraday's homopolar motor.
There was a short story I read ages ago in some collection somewhere I've been dying to find. I think it was from the 60s or 70s, but a scientist brings a man from the future and the man is just a normal guy, so he can't explain anything to the scientist's satisfaction and the scientist gets more and more exasperated.
The dialogue was like:
"What is the dominant mode of transport in the future?"
"Oh, we fleem."
"Fleem? What's fleem?"
"It's a kind of garbol but with more slimp."
"Okay, never mind. How do you do it?"
"Oh, that's easy, you simply merfingle the blem and you're fleeming away!"
It isn't so hard really, to make electricity even in the olden days.
A dynamo is just a copper wire with a magnet spinning inside.
Making a copper wire you can accomplish by having a hole at the bottom of a kiln that drops directly into a big vat of water. Or even just drawing a line in the sand and pouring it in there.
Getting your hands on a natural magnet might pose more problems, but ultimately those are found in nature. So they should have already been dug up by someone.
Using the electricity usefully is harder. Since creating a light bulb needs access to gasses. What could we even use the electricity for?
If you can make a dynamo, you can make a motor. Now, you aren't about to create Tesla. But there's plenty of things back in the day that could benefit from being motorized.
Could you also do ac/dc conversion to make the electricity useful elsewhere? I'm guessing charging and transporting primitive batteries won't be able to fulfill any useful purpose at all.
You can create light with electricity with two carbon rods to make an arc light. It was literally the first electric light source and in widespread use for a long while, along with incandescent bulbs.
Umm you go to the beach and something about certain grains will be different. Look mate, see how you boil liquid. Do that with milk until just before it boils and that's the milk now pasteurised which means it will kill the things in it that make you ill. Also boil the water before drinking it?
That's all I got. I guess sphagnum moss is good for absorbing blood/dealing with wounds?
Rudementary magnets, in the form of lodestones, have been known since antiquity. Wire, on the other hand, is a modern miracle. You can't hand-forge that.
For anyone interested a simple way is to wrap copper wire around a magnet. Static electricity was also one of the first ways people started noticing electricity.
Parlor tricks might be able to get you far when you time travel to the ancient past.
If you could find a jeweller and had an understanding of basic electrical systems, you could probably get a rudimentary capacitor and engine going. From there, who knows what you could do. Maybe even lightbulbs.
You could fill it with co2 .put an animal bladder on the mouth of a clay bottle where something is fermenting like wine or beer. The yeast will produce a fair ammount of c02 and fill the bladder. Use the bladder to fill the bulb. It wont last long but it will be longer than just air
First of all, no one would understand you, but how someone already pointed out, make a spool with copper and spin it. For bonus points, put a iron slab inside the spool
Edit: as someone pointed out you kinda need a magnet
eh language barriers are generally overstated i think, people with completely unrelated languages develop pidgins within the decade, and if you're dropped into a place where they speak some complete gibberish like french you'll still just naturally figure it out given a year or so of being forced to endure it.
Something that people miss though is that they do hit some roadblocks that if not for some extremely lucky coincidences, they wouldn't have any way to do it. Specifically for various materials that just so happen to be around them.
I mean, from this thread it shows people kinda remember stuff from those classes, but are missing a lot. Which is understandable, people left school and didn't use that information, it doesn't make you stupid.
But then you think, oh yeah! I remember how to make electricity, I need copper and an iron rock! So you spend all this time trying to manufacture some relatively thin copper wire, iron would probably be a little easier to find, wrap it around and then you're like.... Okay what went wrong? Annnnd you can't remember you actually needed a magnet and you gotta spin it.
Then do you remember learning how to store it? Connect it to anything useful? Maybe kinda, but extrapolate the first situation to every topic ever and that's what you'd get, half baked ideas that you don't really remember the specifics of. And the specifics really actually matter lol.
Even if you studied it, the answer boils down to "magic".
You take these magnets, and move them around these long snakes of metal (because electrons can move easily through metal) and that makes the electrons in the wires move.
Okay, why does moving around a magnet near metal make something inside it move?
Well there's something we call the "Lorentz force" which basically pushes a magnetic thing in a specific way if you move another magnetic thing around it