Time travel

pitkin said:
Maybe some sort of chain drive perhaps? Invent the bicycle?
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Haha I think the dilemma here is which invention do you pick first and how do you filter them in so you aren't burned as a witch? Is bicycle too radical, maybe skateboard first? :D
 
Did people shave 500 years ago?

Triple blade razor was a fairly recent invention...reckon you could put that idea to the people of 500 years ago without freaking them out?
 
Most ideas would founder on a lack of practical skills, transport, communication and materials. How many people would know how to cast a simple machine part, for example? And how would you find the best people?

The biggest thing I could bring is the importance of cleanliness in medical procedures. It would be achievable with existing technology. The problem there would be convincing people of the benefit, given the lack of statistical understanding at the time.

The spring mouse trap. I reckon that would be immensely beneficial and immediately useful.

I don't have the skills to make aspirin from willow bark, sadly. That would be a goody.
 
potatolord said:
Most ideas would founder on a lack of practical skills, transport, communication and materials. How many people would know how to cast a simple machine part, for example? And how would you find the best people?

The biggest thing I could bring is the importance of cleanliness in medical procedures. It would be achievable with existing technology. The problem there would be convincing people of the benefit, given the lack of statistical understanding at the time.
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You're underestimating the effect of telling everyone "you're doing it wrong".

Look what happened to Ignaz Semmelweis. You may well end up dead.

Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever (also known as "childbed fever") could be drastically cut by the use of hand disinfection in obstetrical clinics.

Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis supposedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later, from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.
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Just write it all down and seal it somewhere safe so that come 2021 you're revered as a god. Or that as time goes on and your ideas get proven, others yet to be discovered are looked at in advance.

In reality, I'm not a mathemetician but a lot of more 'basic' maths would be useful since it requires no resources and proves itself. That would lead you onto credibility and a team to potentially try and recreate other things using other talented minds.

Anything meaningful like electricity I would have no clue where to start beyond water turning something and then *shrug*.

Pinhole photography would be quite easy to recreate and would be cool - photos from 500 years ago!
 
I would just google a load of scientific theories, write them out word for word with an inkwell to they look authentic and then go back in time and start talking about them to to scientific community.

I'd go down as the greatest inventor in history, and because of this I may be able to impart a better way of life than the selfish, self-serving version of "capitalism" we have now to try and combat poverty, disease and starvation around the world, which would allow the human race to advance at a faster rate so we can explore the universe earlier to that my pals can go for a night out on an asteroid somewhere 2,000,000 light years away and chat up some sweet alien babes in 2021.
 
Rarther than improving the world, where can I Bury or hide the gold and jewels I have fleeced off the peasants to recover when I go back to the future ?
 
jsmoke said:
You may be able to make penicillin but I'm not sure how you do that, roughly it's growing mold on food and separating out the penicillin but I'm sure there's a lot more involved to get a working product.
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Yes and no. You can get a working product easily. Penicillin was being used at least as far back as the ancient Greeks. It wasn't widely used and not even the people advocating its use had any idea how it worked, but it was used. If you want to change the world, though, you have a much harder problem to solve - scale. For antibiotics to be world-changing, they need to be available very widely and at a widely affordable cost. Especially so if you were doing it 500 years ago as no public healthcare system existed. On top of that, you'd need a very large number of production facilities all over the place because transportation was a lot more limited.

But I think it would be a bad idea anyway even if you could do it. In that scenario, penicillin would be the only antibiotic and there would be no chance of any more. The knowledge and everything else needed for developing other antibiotics wouldn't and couldn't exist, so you'd end up with a pretty rapid development of penicillin-resistant bacteria and amongst the very bad effects of that would be a massive blow to the whole idea of antibiotics. So you'd change the world, but I think probably for the worse.

Which is a problem with any "travel back in time and change things" scenario - the effects might well not match the intention.

For me personally, I can't think of anything. Most of us don't have the required depth of knowledge about any technology and all the things necessary to suport it to be able to transplant it to c1600. For example, some people here have detailed knowledge of how an internal combustion engine works. Enough knowledge to be able to "invent" the concept in c1600. Enough knowledge to be able to draw a detailed enough diagram to allow for at least an initial attempt at making one. But they wouldn't be able to transplant the necessary material sciences and manufacturing facilities to c1600. Without those, even a perfect blueprint of every aspect of a fully functional ICE is just a picture.

If I had some time before the journey back in time, I could have a go at it. My initial thought would be to find out how to make a hand-cranked printing press with the type set on cylinders. I think that could be made with c1600 technology.
 
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