Buy it, memorise it, you’re naked. It saddens me to say that too many people on this thread are immoral plagiarisers. I mean what happens to Plato Simpson, who got rich and philanthropic from inventing the chocolate bicycle, when you steal his idea? No, I think the Ops original question would be not only impossible but undesirable. Perhaps I can persuade you, when you’re rich, to buy me some shares in Colgate and tuck them away for me. In fact, you could build a very nice portfolio for your descendants, and your friend in the future (me). Actually, I’m 77, you should have left instructions.
I’m going to assume that all the biological shit… like do I have immunity, can I eat the food without getting ill, etc… is all taken care of during the Event. I’m also going to assume I’m magically 19 again, because sending a 53yo guy who is going to croak w/in a month because everything he ingests gives him the fuckin’ runs seems to be a big-assed waste of time and energy, and since this is a time-travel hypothetical, I’m buying the Value-Pak to take advantage of the de-aging process.
So there.
Now, how to convince people? Of that I would have no idea. I mean, I know enough about the 1820s to tell you the Presidents, I can definitely hum to you the main themes to Beethoven’s 9th symphony (debuted in 1824 or so, right?), but as to when the 9th crosses the Atlantic, I have no idea.
Really, the only way I would be able to convince people I’m from the future is to become rich as fuck. And even then they won’t be convinced… but I’ll still be rich as fuck.
1820s America. Your big growth industries are shipping, forestry, agriculture, whaling, and a nascent financial system centered around Boston, NYC, and Philly. Railroads are just beginning to be a thing, but the early 19th-century is really the golden age of canals and waterways - the Erie canal was finished earlier, Henry Shreves is doing his damndest to remove all the knots and tanglements along the Red, Mississippi, and Ohio rivers culminating in his clearing the Great Raft… though that was more of an 1830s project.
I would set my sights on Boston. Probably the most sophisticated city in America (at this point, Philly is the only rival… NYC doesn’t really become NEW YORK CITY until around the 1840s), the mid-Atlantic states… from Evans’ factory in Delaware to the shippers in Boston… is where the beginnings of the American Industrial Revolution show themselves. The Cabot family is a thing (the Lodges don’t appear until the 1850s, sorry), the Adams’s are still powerful… so, yeah, Boston would be my goal.
I still have no idea how to convice these people I’m from the future though, so I’m merely going to become the wealthiest investor in America, a man with uncanny timing to get in and out of markets, a person who keeps on backing the right horse (guys, if I live long enough, I’m gonna back that young clerk at Andrews, Clark & Company when he buys out his partners for $72k in February, 1865. Guy has a plan for standardizing the refining and distribution of oil, the energy source of the future).
To be frank, I think insurance would be my ticket. Insurance was getting to be a massive industry then and companies still around today, such as The Hartford (founded 1821) and Cigna (1789), were already in existence. Insuring whalers, ships, and cargo, I would use my profits to invest in those things I know will blow up financially… Vanderbilt’s boats, whale oil (until around 1860, then GET OUT!), railroads (they commonly went bust, but, oh, those 19th-century dividends, where ‘retained capital’ wasn’t even a concept).
I would also invent some basic process-improvement items. Like a Gantt chart, now called a JohnT chart. Cash flow would be a revolutionary concept (hell, cash flow wasn’t even a thing until the 1950s, and the statement of cash flows that investors know and love wasn’t really finalized until the 1980s.)
So when it’s 1869, with my $69 million fortune not being able to bring me relief for my gout, when people ask ‘How did you know how and when to invest?’, ‘where did you come up with the idea of continous improvement’, and ‘how did YOU wrote all these pop tunes while amassing this fortune?’, I’ll tell them ‘I’m from the future’… and not a single soul will believe me.
Can’t say I didn’t try to convince! 
Maybe we’re looking at this backwards. Rather than trying to convince people in 1820 that you are are a time traveler by yourself; take advantage of the local talent to do it for you. I’d head to New England and look up a ten year old PT Barnum or a fifteen year old Joseph Smith.
That Beethoven comment got me thinking…
Suppose I did go to 1820 America. Went to the most cultured people in the country, started singing “Freude schoner Gotterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium”, the whole 9… yards.
Well, the American premier of the work was in 1846, 22 years after its European debut. And suppose some of those people in the audience remembered that crazy guy from 1820 singing the same words and melody.
Now… what are they going to tell themselves and their friends:
“I swear to God I think I met Beethoven! He was here! In Boston! Sung me this very passage, he did!”
… or …
“I swear to God I think I met a time traveler!”
?
…”I met the guy Ludwig stole that tune from!”
So the premise is that a mentally deficient person is sent back to 1820?
I wonder whether advanced accounting would be feasible in an era of quill pens and no adding machines.
Eh, the real question is whether a statement of cash flows is really necessary in an age with few financing options. Most companies are doing some form of cash accounting and are probably more in tune with how cash is coming in and out than later multinationals like Standard Oil and Royal Dutch.
Are you saying that the vast majority of people today are ‘mentally deficient’? I mean, who knows, off the top of their head how to make stainless steel? Even at the detail level of ‘mix chromium with steel’ it’s probably an obscure fact that most people would not be able to bring up. And that’s not knowing how to make stainless steel, that’s being able to vaguely describe what’s in it. Knowing enough to actually make (or direct someone to make) stainless steel, even with a fat stack of cash and a willing experimenter to put the best that 1820 has to offer together, is really, really rare.
I think most people making concrete have to read the directions, and just being able to mix a few bags of modern materials with water doesn’t mean that you know how to actually make it from scratch. Basic concrete was known since antiquity, and modern concrete requires cement. If you happen to know how to make cement yourself you could make it a little early, but 1820 is only four years before cement was made so you have to hurry (and you’re not really going to come off as ‘spooky future knowledge’ but ‘wow, you finished a process that someone was already working on’).
I’m also pretty sure that the OP’s reference to ‘make a battery’ is to making a modern battery, not one of the batteries that have been around since antiquity and which anyone with scientific training in 1820 would be familiar with already. I know that a lithium-ion battery has lithium in it, but I would have no idea how to make one NOW without reference materials, and certainly couldn’t do it with 1820s tools and materials.
Your definition of ‘mentally deficient’ is absurd.
Just to put some numbers on it, if you had the opportunity to invest in two technology startups, one helmed by a person born in this time and one by a person who lived to adulthood 200 years in the future and then came back to this time, what would the relative valuations you’d give those companies be?
I’d back the future-CEO by a factor of 20x.
Also, at no point in my suggestion did I say you should go to a bunch of people and claim to be a time traveler. If you want to prove you’re a time traveler, you do so by successfully innovating the future.
But you can learn that stuff. Just like the people who live in that time learned it. You seem to think that I’m saying that on day 2 (after finding clothes), I’m setting up shop and mindlessly trying to build something I remember vaguely, failing to learn or test my assumptions in any way, instead of taking the lay of the land and carefully picking up the low-hanging fruit of things that are within the capabilities of the time and haven’t been done yet.
Like, yes, your hypothetical moron who seizes on the idea of the lightbulb (instead of it being one of thousands of inventions he might consider) and pursues it without any strategy or awareness of his surroundings would fail.
A reasonably intelligent person might fail too, but he’d still have a huge advantage.
The fact that you know more about technology in the 1820s certainly gives you good counterarguments right now. But the me that’s transported to the 1820s doesn’t need to be an expert on technology in the 1820s beforehand because I will have the 1820s to refer to.
1980 would be right in my wheelhouse. I’m a software developer, and I absolutely have enough understanding of the industry and technology of the time to be a player. C was developed in the 1970s, so I don’t even have to learn a new language to jump right in. But that doesn’t really answer the question of whether I could do so with much more diffuse knowledge of a distant past.
Look, I’m happy to accept that general knowledge of how light bulbs work is not actually relevant in 1820. But there are lots and lots of inventions and discoveries that, in retrospect, could easily have been accomplished decades earlier. The knowledge that something can be done, and generally how it was successfully done, is a huge leg up in making it.
For perspective, lots of folks have made a potato or lemon battery as a science project… and most of them think that the potato or lemon is the source of the energy.
For me, I know that steel is an alloy of iron, carbon, and various other elements depending on the sort of steel, and I know that chromium is one of the other elements used in stainless steel. But what other elements? In what proportions? How do you effectively alloy them without, for instance, all of your carbon burning off? Those, I can’t tell you.
You know what? If I found myself in 1820 with no way back, I think I’d kill myself.
Don’t fight the hypothetical!
Also not that the Voltaic cell was invented in 1800, so even if you remember how to make a basic battery, it’s not going to make people think that you’re from the future, but that you’re not decades out of touch on scientific advances.
Ironically, stuff that’s inside you might be able to provide strong evidence that you were from the future - after you died. If for example, you had a pacemaker, or an artificial hip or other like implant (complete with patent number and date of manufacture).
For what it’s worth, according to wikipedia the kind of vacuum pump Edison used appears to be within the engineering capabilities of the 1820s, and was based on a 16th-century machine that could produce a pressurized stream of air. The History of vacuum pumps suggests that there was a long gap in development due to general disinterest and lack of obvious utility. Looks like machines to make glass tubes were coming on line right around 1820, so perhaps that was the necessary improvement in standardization that led to further progress a few decades later.
Now, I’m not saying that I knew (prior to looking this up) how to build that vacuum pump, or necessarily that I would be able to figure it out from first principles. But if knowledge of the air-pressurizing part of the trompe exists, it’s not crazy to look there for inspiration to build a vacuum pump even if you have (like me) a pretty vague knowledge of how gasses work from a few semesters of decade-old half-forgotten college-level chemistry and physics.
Regardless, it’s a good example of something that could have been built decades earlier and just… wasn’t. Why not? Well, there wasn’t an obvious need for a vacuum pump. Why wasn’t there an obvious need? Because we didn’t have any time travelers who knew that you needed a better vacuum to make a commercially successful electric bulb.
Honestly, I can see why. For one thing the lack of creature comforts (running hot water, heating, comfortable clothing, toilets, etc) is going to be unpleasant. Plus depending on where you land, you’re going to be exposed to people held in slavery, or at the very least appalling racism, anti-semitism, poor treatment of women, xenophobia and so on.
What might be nice to see is the natural world without 200 years of people consuming resources. So there would still be vast herds of bison on the prairie, enormous flocks of passenger pigeons, and large schools of cod off the Outer Banks. Travel is so hard that you’re not likely to see too much but that might be the most interesting thing to see.
The board seems to have eaten a post I made here the other day.
I was pointing out one way you could get rich in 1820. Buy land in Western New York. The Erie Canal was already being built and had reached as far as Syracuse in central New York by 1820. It would continue westward and be completed by 1825. And when it was completed, land values along the canal boomed.
For the people who are talking about getting rich via inventions, I’ll point out that people tended to take a casual attitude towards patents back in that era. There are numerous examples of some inventor who came up with a great idea which he patented. But everyone else just started using his idea without paying him a cent. Long court battles would ensue but usually cost more than they won in payments.
Copyright enforcement was equally weak.
dupe