Perhaps I could prove my futureness by demonstrating my absolute unfamiliarity with things familiar to everyone of the day. Stuff like how to ride a horse, how to build a fire, how to write using a quill pen and so forth. A lot of everyday skills would be beyond us.
I think you’re going the opposite way and overestimating science in 1820. This was an entire generation before Semmelweis tried to convince other doctors of the antiseptic theory and they refused to listen to him. And Semmelweis was a doctor from a recognized university and he had data he had gathered from his medical practice to back his theory up.
Im not sure you would be. Virus would mutate over 200 years and you might by very soon sick or dead.
Speak for yourself - I know how to do all that shit. Maybe not well…
I like Morbo’s approach. Settle down in a place on Manhattan and dazzle your way into high society. A few strategic patents and copyrights and Robert’s your mother’s brother.
As for Drake…don’t beat him to it. Take the money you’ve conned from all the rich of the day and buy the leases when the market collapses a few years later.
Yes, that is why the “supplying convincing evidence” is the hard part – people don’t like to give up their paradigms when they THINK they already know how something works. However, the claim I’m responding to was “The whole concept of germs, viruses, and immunity might not register with them enough to impress them or connect their dots,” which implies that people in 1820 would have been unable to grasp the idea at all. They would! They might not buy it, just as I do not buy the idea that coronavirus was deliberately engineered in a lab, but they certainly would have been able to understand it.
Fort me it’s simple. I wear glasses, no line bifocals to be exact. Take me to an 1820 glassmaker. He can tell immediately that my eyeglasses simply can’t be from that time.
What’s that you say? I can’t wear glasses because I have to be stark naked? Screw it, I ain’t going.
Those are called “caesarian sections” because, well the procedure has been around since a few years before 1820.
I think you miss the point. Children were born by caesarean section in ancient times - but the mothers almost never survived (in 1865, in the UK, the material survival rate was all the way up to 15%)
P.S. It’s not named that because Julius Caesar was born that way. If it was named for him at all, it was named because he made the law requiring an attempt at caesarean section when a pregnant woman died (no one was trying this on a living woman)
A Chinese person from Taiwan today, where traditional Chinese characters are still used, would not have too much trouble reading Chinese if they found themselves in 1820 China. However, a younger Chinese person from the Chinese mainland, educated using simplified characters, would have a rather difficult time reading Chinese in 1820. Some characters were not changed a great deal, but others are written quite differently.
Understanding spoken Chinese, on the other hand, would be difficult, but possible as long as the modern Chinese (Mandarin) speaker found themselves in Beijing where Mandarin was spoken. Outside of Beijing, it would be next to impossible to understand what others were saying to you.
I would think that the crowns and fillings I have would be well ahead of the local abilities.
It would be entertaining but not the first flying toy. Perhaps a more advanced model could demonstrate how control surfaces work. To the right people explaining how stable flight is achieved would be interesting. A model hang glider would demonstrate something more important, unlike a simple paper airplane a full sized hang glider could be easily made and flown with the technology of the time. That wouldn’t be well understood from a model though. A full sized glider isn’t just a blown up version of a toy though, it is scalable and it is a highly stable and controllable design.
Trouble is, none of that proves you are from the future, only that you know how to build a glider.
If you want to prove you are from the future you better be pretty good at predicting the near future. If you can tell someone something that will happen that day or the next they may believe you. With each day that goes by after that your prediction eventually coming true will be considered more of a lucky coincidence then proof of your time travel ability.
The problem with these tricks like predicting the future is that they take far too long. When challenged by a large crowd of hostile people from another century, you need some tricks or tactics that work more or less instantly on the spot.
What about turning water into wine? Would that work?
As XT said above, though, it is not obvious what you would gain by convincing someone that you were from the future. If you do make a prediction that turns out to be kind of close but just wrong enough due to the history books being inaccurate or distorted, you end up looking like an idiot. And if you promise wondrous future tech but fail to deliver because you did not understand it well enough now, again you just look like a crank. So, why bother? If they figure it out, fine, but why try to convince them.
And quite frankly, since you can not determine whether there will be a way for you to jump back ahead 2 centuries, it seems like what you need to focus on the the 1820 moment is adapting yourself to the era. Since we are so used to how advanced we are now, coping with early nineteenth century living sounds like a considerable challenge that may consume more of your time than you can spare for parlor tricks.
The first bicycle was just being invented then. Steerable fork, but no pedals. I could explain some basic chain-drive principles to a good workshop.
I have a stent in an artery, but I’m not sure I want 1820 surgeons taking me apart to look at that.
I can stick out my tongue and touch my ear and maybe 100 other dad jokes, which might convince them I was from another cultural era.
Then, a pair of shoes were identical. I’d explain using two different lasts, to make left and right shoes to fit.
If I may semi-hijack the thread a bit:
If we want to be believed as time travelers in 1820, how would someone from 2220 convince us that he’s a time traveler in our current year? Because he could make predictions like “Biden will best Trump in 2020 and win reelection in 2024, then Ocasio-Cortez becomes the nation’s first female president, and the first manned Mars landing finally happens in 2037 but it was China, not America, that got there”…oh, and he is saying all this in some form of futuristic English that sounds horribly mangled to our ears, and we can only barely make out what he is saying.
How would we believe that he’s actually from 2220 instead of a lunatic who makes educated sounding guesses about the future but still needs to be put in a padded cell?
Then, how would we convince that 1820 crowd likewise…
If you happened to know the magic formula for Portland cement, all readily available at that time, its superiority could have been quickly shown.
If I were a mason in 1820 and you showed me Portland cement, my reaction would be “Wow, that jtur88’s a clever fellow”, not “Wow, he must be a time traveler!”
Fun OP, but I agree with others that it may be quite impossible to actually convince your audience. It’s even more difficult if you didn’t get a chance to prepare. A wiser course would probably be simply to try to survive using your knowledge, as in Lest Darkness Falls.
As to the language, I believe that people before mass media were quite used to meeting strangers with different accents and dialects.
Personally I’d be hard pressed to recall historic events just after 1820. I would probably try to get a job as a math teacher, which should be easy with elementary mathematical knowledge. And I’d try to contact a university to rediscover some theorems that I might half-heartedly remember. Or see whether I’d be able to cooperate with a physics professor (or what it was called at the time), and try to predict some nineteenth century discoveries (Maxwell’s equations? Neptune?). But I’m afraid there is a good chance I do not remember enough and do not have the talent to make up for what I miss.
It’s really sobering to consider how little ready knowledge us modern humans have.