If you could travel to the year 1820, how could you prove you were from the future?

In My Humble Opinion
101

Well, I know something more, however. I know that most of the people who became REALLY wealthy didn’t do so by looking for gold. They did so by selling stuff to the miners. So, in the case of the gold fields at Sutter’s Mill, for instance, my plan would be to first find it (I know about where it is in modern times, but no idea what it looked like in the 1820’s. The best I could do is half remembered paintings or drawings I’ve seen of what it looked like in 30-40 years later), then essentially take out all of the low hanging fruit…the large gold pieces washed down from above and into the river beds. Then, with that as a stake, you start to build up supplies and carefully allow word to get out and sell to those coming in to search for gold. This wouldn’t be a new thing, as there had been several, earlier gold rushes going back to the late 18th century…all it would need is a spark to get another one started.

You are right about how history would increasingly diverge from when you started to make changes like having the gold rush come early. You could probably extrapolate what some of those changes would be (I’m fairly sure the US government would become much more focused on westward expansion and the California territory much earlier than they actually did, for instance…but that would also make Mexico. This would be 30 years before California even became a US territory after all.

Thanks, yes, that’s it…Yesterday.

Not sure why you think I wouldn’t have much success. All I need is the plot really, as well as an idea of the overall dialogue. Or, hell, just write a new book based on it. I write short stories and even longer stories NOW, after all, and while I don’t intentionally plagiarized stuff, I think all sci-fi and fantasy have common themes. I’m pretty sure I could write a fairly compelling story based on direct plots of things I’ve read but in this new world no one else has or would. Now, would they be popular? Maybe…maybe not. If I have the money it wouldn’t really matter, as I could get them published and down the road they would be taken as amazingly prescient and ahead of their time, which is the point. If people really like them and read them, and I make a few more bucks that way, well…bonus. :slight_smile:

I could reproduce Edison’s bulb, as I could cut out all the tedious steps he had his team take in testing endlessly for the right filament…the first one he successfully used was a carbonized cotton thread btw, though I think there were several others that worked well enough too). You are correct, it would take a lot to build the infrastructure to produce the electricity. Myself, assuming I had the capital and actually wanted to take this one, I’d go for a city with access to hydro-electric potential, and build essentially a Westinghouse/Tesla AC distribution system for long haul and a conversion to DC in the homes. The nice thing is I wouldn’t have to fight for patents or between Edison and Westinghouse. I know how AC power systems work, especially rudimentary ones, know how you do DC conversion…even can swipe Edison’s idea about light bulb screw in fixtures and grounding. It would take money, but if you could make the case for electric bulbs rather than gas lights and the infrastructure needed for that, which I think you could, it could be built. Cities were already aware of the need to build large infrastructure, since water and sanitation as well as the mentioned gas lighting was already things cities were thinking about or dealing with. Instead of building out gas light and it’s associated infrastructure, you could do electric which actually would take less infrastructure on the back end (more on the front end, so to speak).

You’d need tons of money of course, but assuming you had that you know what is going to win out in the market place in the end, as electricity, for all it’s initial costs, is better and even safer than gas lighting and gas infrastructure.

102

You could do the “Connecticut Yankee” route and predict the 1820 eclipse across Europe, although by then I think the solar eclipse calculations had been figured out.

I was thinking of the “Yesterday” movie angle, but don’t really know much of the literature of the time. I could write “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” 40 years early.

Fill in maps some of the unknown areas and states. Get an expedition to Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, but draw some of the geysers or vistas beforehand.

A strong possibility for me would be math and the beginnings of boolean logic before George Boole writes about it in 1854. Then show how to build binary-based digital logic circuits (half-adders and full-adders) using mechanical switches to add and store information, beating Babbage’s Analog Engine (1837). Since they’d be alive then, talk with them about some simple algorithms, such as sorting and searching. Invent the punch card before Hollerith in the 1880s and start the equivalent of IBM a century early. All of this can done without electronics (vacuum tubes and transistors), but if I get rich enough I could invent those too (or at least describe them).

It’s essentially the same problem Klaatu has in “The Day the Earth Stood Still”. His proof was to convince a mathematics professor, so I think that’d be a good approach.

103

No you couldn’t. How exactly are you going to get a good enough vacuum in 1820? That’s a hard engineering problem that you don’t just solve by saying ‘suck more air out’. People already had working electric lights (as of 1802) and the idea of using a thin filament in an evacuated chamber (or chamber filled with inert gas) to stop it from reacting with the air. There was lots of experimentation with the concept, and the basic idea just wasn’t novel. What was difficult were the practical, engineering issues of making a bulb, and ‘uh, carbonized cotton thread’ just doesn’t solve those - as early as 1850, Joseph Wilson Swan had created a light bulb with carbonized paper filaments in an evacuated bulb, but getting a good enough vacuum had to wait until the 1870s.

It’s like the way you could go back and say that a tungsten wire would be the best wire, and be right - just like Edison knew that a tungsten wire would make the best incandescent lights back when he was first working on his bulbs. But it wasn’t until over 20 years later that people were able to reliably manufacture a proper tungsten filament, so if he had relied on that knowledge and just stuck to tungsten, someone else would have invented a practical light before him.

104

Well, my thought on that would be to replace the air with an inert gas. I’m not a chemist, but I’m fairly sure I could figure that out. Wouldn’t nitrogen work? I’m pretty sure I could make that anyway…or, if I had the money, my previously mentioned stable of lab workers and scientists a la Edison himself. I wouldn’t try to do a vacuum as that would be a lot more difficult.

105

Well, the way you do it is find a bunch of gullible or easily amused people. We have people on the internet right now that pretend to to be from the future, and lots of people either believe them, or consume their stories for entertainment. Just say things as they really happened to the right people and they will believe you.

That aside, the only “superpower” the average Joe, traveling to 1820 would have, would be to notice small things that they don’t have, then “invent” them himself. Sure, maybe he’s not going to recreate the iPhone, and he probably could invent stuff more on the “as seen on TV” level. Stuff that ordinary people, non-scientists have invented.

The pencil from the OP is a bad example, since pencils pre-exist 1820, but you could invent the paper clip. Or the crossword puzzle. Or the spork. Or the swiss army knife. Or the zipper. No, you don’t have to be able to personally make one yourself, a patent can be taken out with simple diagrams. Make something simple like the paper clip, then you can pay people to engineer out the more complicated stuff.

Maybe after you invent all this stuff, you can maybe convince a good amount of people you’re from the future. If Tesla came up with some wild stories about being from the future, a lot of people might have believed it.

I see very little benefit to “proving” that to anyone however. Better to profit off it.

106

I wouldn’t want to. They might burn me as a witch. :eek:

107

Being wrong about the only piece of knowledge that they didn’t already have in 1820 isn’t valuable. Your ‘general knowledge’ of ‘run electricity through something, put it in an evacuated bulb to stop it burning out’ was already there - an electric light had already been made in 1802 and people messed around the with the concept of evacuated bulbs ever since then. The problem (and one you haven’t offered a solution for) is that getting a good enough vacuum was a difficult engineering problem, as was getting a good enough vacuum cheaply and efficiently enough to mass produce long-lasting bulbs.

Incorrect knowledge of how something works is an active impediment to progress, as you have to first figure out that you’re wrong, then figure out what’s right. If you ‘know’ that you need a metal filament, then you’re going to spend time testing metal filaments instead of something that will actually work. And this ignores the fact that you’re not going to have as good of a vacuum as Edison did due to 50 years of advancement in that field, so you’re just going to fail over and over at trying to get the bulb clear enough to duplicate Edison’s work. Even just 20 years before Edison Joseph Wilson Swan had a working light bulb, he just couldn’t make it practical (largely due to the difficulty of getting a good vacuum).

Again, people already had all of the ‘general knowledge’ you provided that wasn’t simply incorrect. The ‘general knowledge’ was never a problem in making a light bulb, it was the engineering work of making a practical long-lived light bulb, which is the part you don’t have, and the part that required so much trial and error.

If they followed your example, they’d come back with something like ‘quantum computing can solve a lot of hard problems, make a good quantum computer with [design idea] using [substance] and we’ll make billions!’, but the [design idea] is something we already know but won’t have the engineering ability to usefully produce for 50 years, and the '[substance] is something we won’t be able to manufacture in a form useful for quantum computers for another 20-30 after that.

108

You clearly know more about the invention of light bulbs than others in the thread, but rather than focusing in on this single example, I’d be interested in your thoughts on the general question.

Person from 200 years in the future shows up and tells us about general advancements in the last 200 years with the various holes in knowledge that people have from historical distance.

Is your contention that all of his knowledge would be so flawed and incomplete that it wouldn’t help us at all? Essentially, do you think the light bulb example generalizes to everything? There’s no value (or, as I think you keep arguing, actually negative value) in knowing how future advances work because we’ll just fail at execution, or be distracted by a focus on the final result rather than the intermediate steps?

I think that’s totally wrong, and that while my somewhat basic and rudimentary knowledge of how various machines work is insufficient to just magic them into existence in the past, it would give me a massive advantage in building them.

109

I don’t think you’re going to get pure enough gasses to do this in 1820, since in general getting extremely pure gasses is harder than vacuum. Henry Woodward created a nitrogen filled light in 1874, patented it, but weren’t able to commercialize it, and Edison bought the patent, but didn’t use that technique and instead used the vacuum based light that he did. Since Edison already had a patented nitrogen filled light but chose to go with vacuum, I’m going to say that it’s pretty likely that commercializing that was more difficult than what he did do.

110

I think that a random unprepared person from 200 years in the future trying to do that is going to come off as yet another nutjob with a bunch of half-baked ideas, and while there might technically be some useful knoweldge, it’s going to be mixed in with misremembered things, ideas we already have, and ideas where the hard part is the engineering, not the basic idea. It would be a different story if someone carefully prepared.

I think you’re totally wrong in your idea that basic and rudimentary knowledge of how various machines work would give you a massive advantage in building them, since people who’d be doing the building in 1820 already had that basic and rudimentary knowledge. There were already functional electric lights in 1820 and the concept of using a smaller filament for longer battery life and a vacuum to stop them burning out was already there, the hard part of building them was all of the practical work, not the base concept.

111

Googling, 1820 was only a little bit before John Deere started to make his steel plow, apparently out of a saw blade for the first one. I wonder if it would be possible to plagiarize his work?

The thing is that even knowing how something is manufactured may not be enough to make a go of it. There are lots of businesses that failed for other reasons (lack of financing, lack of leadership, more vicious competition). Even when Edison was trying to electrify the nation, and Bell was trying to run phones everywhere, there were competing companies.

112

No, I doubt that too, but it doesn’t have to be pure or even work as well as even Edison’s 2nd phase light bulbs. If it works, oh, say 100 hour or more it will still be cost effective and workable.

Nitrogen was only one idea. Given enough money I think it would be fairly straight forward (note, I didn’t say easy) to push for the discovery of different gasses, including noble or inert gasses that weren’t discovered in our timeline until 50 or even 100 years later. The key is knowing they exist and also being willing to spend the research money on finding them. After all, it had been over 20 years since the discovery that air was composed of different gasses, so won’t exactly be new news at this point.

The thing is, you seem to be operating under the assumption I have to do everything, discover everything, make everything. I don’t. The important bit I’d be doing is amassing a fortune to pay for all this stuff, assuming I even wanted to take this on, which I’m not sure I would. If I did though, I wouldn’t need to do it all…I just need to have an idea of how it works to direct the myriad lab workers and scientists. This is, essentially what Edison did, and his discoveries were so profound because he was the first to really do this, not because he was a lone genius who did it all himself. I’m pretty sure that the things I know really well and things I know good enough could translate, given capital and my desire to take it on, would be enough to produce something workable. If not, well…it still would push science and technology years or decades ahead of where they actually were in the real world because I KNOW the things that really worked, even if I may not know exactly how they were done.

Really, it’s all about having the money and enough time to actually take on the projects and assemble the teams. That is where my own skepticism comes in…my health isn’t great, and I know enough about history and the time period in question to know how dangerous it would be just trying to stay alive in that time. The hard part would be amassing the fortune and living to DO this other stuff…and living long enough to get it going well enough to have momentum going forward.

113

A wonderful illustration of the difficulty. The futuristic character there doesn’t actually know how to make fire, at least, not without other technology like matches or laser spot-welders that themselves require fire in their making. He knows that there’s some way to do it that involves banging rocks, and so is confident in stating “the secret is to bang the rocks together”, even though he doesn’t know what kind of rock, and that it doesn’t even work that way. In fact, making fire by “banging a rock” requires that what you bang the rock on is steel, so that can’t be the way you make the first fire.

As for me, I figure that if I can convince Faraday or the like, then that’s a win, and the rest is just details. But that’s not a trivial step. For starters, assuming that I’m transported back in the same location I’m in now, I’m on the wrong continent, and I’d have to work up the resources to be able to travel. Even if I find an American physicist whose name I recognize, I’d probably still at least need to make my way to the East Coast.

Once in some place that has institutes of higher learning, I’d start by finding some physics professor, convince him that I was bright enough, and probably try to get myself a job as a grader. Meanwhile, I’d be learning the notation used at the time (a lot of the simple notations we take for granted were invented a long time after the applications for them were). Then I’d use knowledge of what other physicists were doing to try to arrange a letter of introduction to someone further up the chain, and repeat until I was able to get to one of the great minds. Only then would I break out the big guns, ideas in that person’s line of inquiry that are beyond what they or anyone else are doing, and drop the bombshell that I’m from the future.

114

That’s at least somewhat fighting (my) hypothetical, though. I don’t doubt that plenty of people would disregard such a person as a nutjob.

But what about the person who believes him. You only need to find a few people who believe in you. If our future traveler starts a company developing the stuff that he already knows works, do you think it just fizzles out? Can’t compete because he only has a partial view of the future, compared to people now who have no actual visibility into which future technologies will work?

At any point when you see a technological advancement, it’s easy to look back and see that the idea existed quite a long time ago. Here’s a cool list of technology as originally described in science fiction. Look, someone thought of the idea of RV living in 1828 and the credit card in 1888. The difference is that there were many competing ideas and theories and no one knew which ones would pan out and be successful. Knowing which ones actually work is incredibly valuable.

And that’s just in one area (engineering/manufacturing).

I’ve taken college-level courses in branches of mathematics that hadn’t had a single paper published in 1820. Deriving and demonstrating something that you already know is orders of magnitude easier than figuring it out in the first place.

115

You just showed up naked in a time in which, unless you’re a very thoroughly studied re-creationist of that specific time, you’re bound to make social errors. If you didn’t show up in the middle of those gold fields to start with, how are you going to get there? If you did show up in the middle of those gold fields to start with, do you know how to stay alive there long enough to collect your stake and then make it to someplace where you can trade? Sutter’s Mill wasn’t there yet. Do you know who lived there, and their languages? Would you know how to stay alive if you showed up naked in that ecosystem in a spot with no obvious human presence?

If you were very, very lucky, I suppose you might pull it off (though probably not by convincing anybody that you’d come from the future.) But I sure wouldn’t count on it.

116

Plagiarizing Colt would be where I started at. Not sure what metallurgy looked like at the time, which might be a limiting factor.

117

The Georgia gold rush is why our state capitol is called the Gold Dome; all of the gold on the cupola came from the mines of Dahlonega. There’s still gold up in the mountains, albeit not enough for commercial mines; the bricks of the Lumpkin County courthouse are estimated to contain about a million dollars’ worth of gold dust.

If you’re familiar with California mining history, you are probably aware that in 1848, Col. Richard B. Mason, the military governor of the province at the time, was shown a sample of gold from Sutter’s Mill. To confirm that it was gold, he called in his assistant, Lt. William T. Sherman - yep, that Sherman - who was familiar with native gold from his time as an Army officer in north Georgia during the boom.

118

No it won’t. There was a prototype light bulb made in the 1850s with tech 30 years better than the stuff you’re going to have in the 1820s, and it wasn’t cost effective and workable. Your idea that you’re going to just magically take ‘filament in an evacuated (or non-reactive-gas-filled) bulb with electricity running through it’ and make a commercially viable product is sheer hubris. People smarter than you who actually knew the tech available at the time ALREADY HAD THE BASIC IDEA and still weren’t able to make a cost effective and workable bulb.

Nitrogren was discovered in 1772. The others were discovered at the end of the 19th century because the tech for isolating them didn’t exist much earlier than that. Developing all of the associated technologies, tools, and skills needed to do so is not something that you’re just going to say ‘discover this’ about.

And… you aren’t given enough money. You show up naked and get some borrowed clothes, and are telling people ideas that you know from within your brain. If you come back with huge sums of money, enough to drive decades of major scientific and engineering products and get lucky and don’t just get robbed or committed and robbed when you come back in time, then maybe you get a particular device a little earlier. But if you gave a scientist or inventor of the time the same crazy amount of money, he’d end up with some pet project happening earlier than it did in our time. Giving someone large sums of money and a goal is the big part here, an idea THAT PEOPLE ALREADY HAD like a light bulb just isn’t.

119

Your hypothetical is not well laid out, is kind of silly, and proposes an absurdly biased question. It also actively fights the hypothetical of this thread. So yes, I’m going to point out some of its problems.

Lots of companies fizzle out because of bad business decisions, bad luck, someone from the business stealing a clever idea for themselves, or coming up with something new that a larger business copies and makes far more on. So yes, if he finds some people (especially people gullible enough to fall for a time travel tale) and starts a company it’s pretty likely that the company fizzles out just in general.

He doesn’t have good visibility into which future technologies will work. He has a vague idea of stuff that is way too advanced to matter to us now, and a bunch of weird beliefs and myths - like the people in this thread who think that the idea of making a light by putting a filament in an evacuated glass bulb was novel in 1820. He doesn’t have a good grasp of what technologies are available now or how to use them, or of the general business and political environment that he’s trying to sell to.

At the level of detail that someone from 200 years in the future would know without specific prep, it’s incredibly worthless. I mean, what would you do trying this even in 1980 (1/5 of the time scale)?

120

I can’t stop thinking of Janeane Garofalo, the B-Minus Time Traveler.

Janeane: “Oh, I remember something! You’re standing in a boat, crossing the Delaware!”

General Washington (Ben Stiller): “Why am I crossing the Delaware? Am I attacking, am I retreating…?”

Janeane: "Possibly retreating. I’m sorry, I don’t REMEMBER!.."

If I don’t get any warning of my Timey Wimey Trip, just to be prepared I’m going to always wearthis…