If you went to Ancient Greece, how much could you invent?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I don’t have much time to post in this thread, but I’ve thought of this for a long time. What would happen if you could go back in time to Ancient Greece, or Rome too, I guess where people placed a good deal of respect in knowledge. Say that everyone accepted that you were from the future and you knew of all of the inventions since then.

How much do you think you could invent? Or to put it another way, how do you think your knowledge could affect things in such a way as to advance the pace of development. I started with thinkign of how you could describe guns.

What would I do? I’d say well, you need gunpowder and you need steel. I don’ t even know how to make steel. Doesn’t it somehow involve C02 and iron? Gunpowder? Isn’t it a mixture of saltpeter and something? I don’t really know how much I could offer in terms of knowledge.

Sure you could help with knowledge and medical advice (cleanliness, etc.) I think I could probably teach a lot in that sense.

What about something simple, like a steam engine? That’s not simple, but its more simple than a car.

I think that if I could somehow could manage a way to make steel, I could introduce railroads at some point before I died.

Anyone else care to give some input on just how much you could offer in terms of knowledge to an ancient civilization with just your own knowledge.

Now, what if you could carry back with you a laptop with a solar cell to charge the battery with any amount of knowledge that you could take. Just how quickly would things progress then?

You can do the hypothetical from a standpoint of if they all spoke English or also from the standpoint that they didn’t understand English. That means you would have to take classical greek before you went back.

Obviously the engineering types could help out a lot with many things. But what would someone like me who stuides social sciences be able to do with that?

How could I convince them to let women vote? I know nothing of agriculture, which would probably have the greatest impact.

I immagine that all technology would be used to conquer other peoples though.

2

I’ve read a lot of stories like this – they usually emphasize how much you need to know in order to really invent anything.

If you get a chance, read L. Sprague de Camp’s book Lest Drkness Fall. It’s a classic SF novel about an archaeologist who finds himself teleported back to ancient Rome, just about at the time of the Fall. He tries first to inven things to keep himself going, then ultimately tries to prevent the Fall of Rome. Extremely interesting book.

His hero, Martin Padway, is lucky in being able to speak Latin. I’d have a hard go of it myself – my Hgh School Latin’s pretty much rusted into immobility. In order to get his first inventions going, he has to first find investors – no easy task. He “invents” distilled spirits, because he knows how to do t, and knows he can sell them. Then he goes on to “invent” double-entry bookkeeping, which is a real improvement over the exsting systems. He tries to invent gunpowder, but it doesn’t work. (I had a couple f friends who tried this in high school. They didnt succeed either). He “invents” movable type and modern printing, but his fitrst run exhausts all the existing vellum in Rome He has to invent paper in order to keep his press going - and this time he really does invent it, because he doesn’t really know how paper is made, so he’s forced to experiment, finally succeeding.

He tries varoious other things. He “invents” the mechanical telegraph, but the locals don’t use it. That has the ring of believability to it.

In short, I think even for relativelky easy things that you know how to do, you’ll spend a huge amount of time getting the aw materials, labor, and capital to get it built. If it’s at all complicated, you’ll need assembly lines, and assembly lines for the assembly lines See the hilarious SF novel The Fying Sorcerors by Larry Niven and Devid Gerrold). Making a working enterprise, then convincing people that they want to do things our way will robably be a real bitch. (See the series “THe ross-Time Engineer” for details. It’s hard to convince people not to use the time-honored method of burning, then chipping out the embers in order to make a dugot canoe. They know that t works – why should they try to chip out unburned wood with an adze, especially since it seems like so much work?)

The classivc novel of the guy-who-goes-into-the-past and invcent things is the first real time-travel novel, Mar Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthgur’s Court. But his Hank Morgan is a factory manager who knows how to make all these things to start with, and the book is still as much about his limitations as about those of King Arthur’s Court.

(By the way de Camp also wrote a “sort-of” time travel novel involving Ancient Greece, The Glory That Was, but nobody tries to impress the ancient Greeks in that one. He also wrote a short story about trying to impress the Greek philosophers with modern ideas – “Aristotle and the Gun”, bt the results were disastrous.)

3

Hey those sound like cool books, but what if you make the assumption that you get ideal conditions that probably wouldn’t have happened. Say that people want your advice and want your inventions and basically consider you god-like, except without any kind of threat to your life. Say they basically understood that you can help them a lot and your collective wisdom coming from 2500 years in the future is something that they need to learn from. Also consider the computer with any knowledge you wanted to carry. What could you as an individual do with knowledge, but no experience.

For me, the laptop thing makes a huge difference.

hmm… what about refridgeration? I think I understand that. Isn’t that basically a gas that is compressed and when it gets compressed it heats up due to thermodynamic principles that is cooled through coils to room temperature, and when it expands it beomces cooler than the orignal temperature? I think I could possibly invent something like that, maybe.

What about a powerplant? That would be difficult, I don’t know where I could get the magnet. The lightbulb? Maybe that would be doable, but what about the glass?

There’s absolutely no way I could invent a TV.
But, we all know certain pieces of information that would be helpful for scientists, right? Say if they asked you for key deciscions so they could just go straight to proven ways.

Hehe… I think Spaceflight might come before the automobile if things were really crazy! Not saying that it would be like the apollo program, but it would be easier to get someone to do a suborbital flight than a car, I think.

4

Boy, there’ so much here. Yo should do a bit of reading. The books I give should be a good start.

Refrigerators? You’ll need close-fitting pistons and cylindrs. If you think that’ easy, consider that it was a major accomplishment when pistons fit into cylinders “so that they do not err by the thickness of an old shilling”. That’s in the 18th century, and if your car’s cylinders fit that badly you wouldn’t pass inspection. It wasn’t until the fit was that good that practical reciprocating steam engines (as opposed to gas-jet engines like Hero’s in the ancient world) became possible. Without pistons just as good, I don’t think you’ll be building a good refrigerator.
And what are you going to use for your compressible gas? No Freon back then. Use ammonia? Do you know how to make it? Wil ordinary ir work as well? How are you going to compress it into tanks? How will you make copper tubing for the system, not to mention solder? (What’s in solder again? Lead, of course. Tin. You know where to get lead and tin, of course. If you want low-temperature solder, you’ll need stuff like bismuth or indium. Good luck.)
Light hulbs. Of course. We’ll just use tungsten filaments. Where do you get tungsten? How do you make it ductile enough to draw without breaking (that was a major accomplishment)? For that matter, do you know how to draw wire? Fabricating the "mold will occupy fair amount of your time – it’ll have to be tougher than the metal you’re drawing, and needs a hole of the right size, shaped just right.

You might just have to go with carbonized wood fibers. Worked for EDison (I think he used bamboo, though. Try finding that in ancient Greece.)

You biggest problem will be getting a good vacuum. That’s really the thing hat kept the incandescent light from being a practical thing for so long – too much residual air to oxidize the hot filament if you don’t have a good vacuum. So you need to build a vacuum pump. Oops! We’re back to that damned cylinder and piston again! And they’d better fit pretty tightly if you’re drawing a vacuum. Yu might ant to build a diffusion pump to get a really good vacuum. You know how to byuild one? Will you use mercury or oil? You can’y just use any oil and you’re not going to find silicone oils in ancient Greece. Maybe you’d better stick with mercury – the locals must know about quicksilver. Of course, you’ll be heating it up. Mercury vapor fumes – yum!

To tell the truth, the glass will e the least of your worries. They knew how to make it back then. Exensive, though.

Any tim I read one of those novels, I measure my own experience and knowledge against what would be required in order to build a comlex piece f invention, and I always come up short. In the preface to The Radio Beasts (1928, I think), Ralph Milne Farley asks you how you would go about building a radio from scratch. He has his hero, Myles Cabot, do thi in the course of the book, and tells you how. Cabot was a genius, of course.

To tell the truth, I think you’d have better luck with the little things that don’t require a lot of preparation or background, like de Camp’s double-entry bookkeeping. IMagine introducing Hindu-Arabic numerals in place of the alphabetic scheme they used. Or modern algebra in place of everything being geometrical. Introduce games (like the heroes do in Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold). No overhead, everyone’s interested, and you make a killing ff ceckers, chess, and playing cards. At least until they figure ot how to make the boards. You’ll just have to kep coming p with new games.

5

Wow, I think about stuff like that all the time. My usual conclusion is that on my own, I couldn’t invent very much. My game plan (for when this happens? Whatever, it’s good to be prepared) is to hang out with the local guys who are already good at inventing stuff, and toss out a few ideas of things they could try.

However, I would be ready to do my duty and invent some fashions. Friends, Romans, countrymen, I present … the cloche hat! Also, I bet I could invent some food.

If I went back far enough, like farther back than anient Greece, I could probably pull off inventing lost wax casting. That I can actually do.

6

okay then…
here’s a question.

What if the Greeks could use the intenet? Say, for instance, you were to give them this laptop with a solar panel, and a magical connection to the internet of today. Providing that there was also a magical ancient greek to modern english translator, what effect do you think it would have? I wonder just how much it would speed up things. How long until they would be able to catch up?

7

Anal sex would be right out! They probably been doin’ it long before I got there.

I guess I would introduce the “Hold Button”. And “Ladies Night”.

8

Ohh! I forgot!

The “Power Ballad”! I’d do all the NightRanger and Styx hits B.C.!

(and get stoned) :wink:

9

I was about to say someone might be able to get by “inventing” tunes for popular music. A friend of mine says she always used to daydream about going back in time just a few decades and beating various pop artists to writing their own hits. The title character in the movie Peggy Sue Got Married attempts this with “She Loves You”, but her musician boyfriend/future husband doesn’t know a surefire hit when he sees it.

I used to think I’d do pretty well as a healer in the Middle Ages, because despite having no real medical knowledge at least I’m familiar with basic hygiene. I might even be able to stop the Black Plague in its tracks! But as another friend pointed out, I’d probably wind up being burned as a witch for my troubles. If not, my actions might result in a horribly altered future due to increased overpopulation.

I doubt I could build or invent anything useful, but I can draw fairly well. If nothing else, I could teach other artists how to do perspective. That would probably go over pretty well, and I wouldn’t need any special materials. I wouldn’t even need to be able to speak the local language.

10

This reminds me of an old “Twilight Zone” episode where a bored rich man encounters a strange travel agency that sends him back in time so he can experience the thrill of rising to the top again. He was planning on using his knowledge of oil fields to make money, but what he didn’t realize is that the oil is inaccessible to the technology of the day, and he has no idea how to invent it.

11

There are some things that I’m fairly certain I could invent and make workable.

A basic electric telegraph for example would be doable. Metals were fairly common even in ancient Greece, as was vinegar. A copper plate, a lead plate and a vinegar bath with some wires and you have a basic functional electric cell. Not exactly astonishing to the modern mind but sufficient that with some experimentation I could build a working telegraph. The hardest part of a telegraph system would be the wire. I have no idea how to make wire but I’m fairly certain that if nothing else I could produce something equivalent to ribbon wire even without the aid of a smith. After that it’s just a case of making large enough batteries and putting in enough relay stations.
And perhaps the common people wouldn’t use it, but I’m fairly certain that the military would employ it. No need for a runner dying of exhaustion to tell of the defeat of the Persians. Instead he runs 5 miles to the Marathon telegraph station and the message arrives in Athens 5 minutes later. That would be military gold in those days.
Even without such ‘technological’ innovations though there are many other inventions we could all create IF we were living to see that they were needed. Many of these inventions seem blindingly obvious to us, but they weren’t to the ancient Greeks. For example anyone could invent stirrups. And yes, I mean simple horse stirrups. The Greeks didn’t have them and as a result cavalry charges were limited. Most people wouldn’t realise they didn’t have them however, but after 5 minutes living in ancient Greece I’m sure that anybody would realise they were missing. The same goes for horse collars which revolutionised agriculture in the middle ages. There are probbaly thousands of such inventions that we could all make that we simnply don;t realsie the ancient Greeks were ignorant of.

What I wouldn’t be going for are the big technical projects with lots of moving parts. They’re well outside my area of expertise. But things like horse collars or bookkeeping or the turntable axle are as much in the concept as the actual building, yet any one could revolutionise the ancient world.

As far as agriculture, that’s not really something that you could probably make a lot of progress in, and I know a fair bit about agriculture. The problem is that while we might know about crop rotation, selective breeding, fertiliser and so forth the results aren’t all that dramatic even in one lifetime much less one season. Although adoption of my knowledge could probably double agricultural productivity in ancient Greece I very much doubt that I could convince anyone to adopt it. The one possible exception might be the adoption if a few basic pesticides.
And that’s the problem for so many potentially revolutionary discoveries. Basic sanitation and sewage would save the lives of millions, but we’d never convince anyone to finance it. Basic hygiene would be the same.

However if you wanted one great invention that anyone could make that would make you a local God in ancient Athens it is this: inoculation using cowpox. Smallpox was a major scourge of the ancient world. Find a milkmaid who had cowpox symptoms who was clearly immune to smallpox. Collect pus from her an inoculate children using the simple method of cutting the skin and smearing the wound with pus. Instant and effective inoculation. But at that time anyone who could guarantee immunity to smallpox would have revolutionised the world and would be seen as mystical.

Now if I could take a laptop with the equivalent of the full-version Encyclopaedia Britannica and a dozen other carefully selected texts I really could change the world. Then I really could make steel and gunpowder. I really could make penicillin, admittedly in tiny amounts but enough to save the lives of enough rich patrons that I could finance penicillin factories to synthesise more. With several comprehensive reference texts as could be readily stored on a laptop I could alter the course of the world, provided I wasn’t made to drink hemlock as a dangerous heretic first.

12

Hmm. I doubt I could actually invent much. I’m not all that practical a person.

That being said, I wouldn’t need to, because there were plenty of ancient greeks who were, and I can teach them something far more valuable. Science and mathematics.

I know enough basic physics and chemistry that I can teach them the fundamental principles, and in particular the fundamental ideas of scientific investigation.

Oh, and given that it’s ancient greece and they’ve already got mathematicians of sorts in place I can also teach them more mathematics than they can shake a stick at. The trick would be to actually get them interested in it, which I think I could manage if I could actually get them to listen to me for a bit.

Given that, hopefully I could get some of them interested in the engineering applications and speed things up by getting them to do the work themselves. I probably wouldn’t see the benefits in my lifetime though.

With a laptop, who knows. I’ll leave that one to someone who knows more about ancient greece. :slight_smile:

13

Did you recall the guy trying to invent the automobile self-starter ? He goes into the 1890’s machine shop, and tries to describe a starter to the machinist-then realizes he has no way to tell the guy what he wants!
Seriously…you couldnot do much in Ancient Greece, because all of the minor (but very necessary) technology hadn’t been invebnted yet! Take the staem engine: without a modern lathe, there was no way to make pistons accurate enough to function! Similarly, the automobile could not be invented until the following stuff was around:
-high-strength steel
-accurate gear cutting machines
-petroleum distllation (gasoline)
-electrical wiring, magnets, and coils(a rudimentary understanding of electricity)
So, you would have gone out of your mind in ancient greece.

14

Maybe trying to introduce our modern technology isn’t the way to go. How about ideas which only require “people skills” and some shrewdness?

Could you invent insurance? Stock trading? Interest-based banking?

Loan sharking? A casino? Pyramid scams? Rigged sports events?

Granted, all of this would probably have to be done using chickens or something as money… but you catch my general drift. Would anything along this line be practical in that environment, or were people just too damn poor to make wealth-manipulation a workable “technology”?

Then again, you could always try to start a cult… :smiley:

15

“… Those three which were unknown to the ancients, and whose origin, although recent is obscure and inglorious; namely printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three things have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.”
Francis Bacon
English philosopher, statesman, and essayist
d. 1626

16

Quoth Blake:

I suspect a working telegraph will be harder than you expect, unless you’ve built one from scratch. Youre gona need an electromagnet for that buzzer or whatever you use to receive the signals. That means that, in addition to making wire, you’re going to have to insulate it, or else the windings will make electrical contact and you won’t get the full magnetic field you want. No rubber or plastic in ancient Greece. Maybe you can make shellac coatings, if you find the appropriate insects and can figure out how to convert it. Maybe you can find some non-rubber plant sap to use.

Overall, it would be easier to make mechanical telegraphs (you build towers with a battery of arms on top. Diffeent positions of the arms indicate different letters. You put them on mountaintops within sight of each other, and with a chain of these you can send messages a long way.) Or maybe you can make signal fire/heliograph telegraph relays. The technology s a lot easier. As I mentioned, de Camp had such a system set up in his book, but the natives didn’t want to use it, so it failed.

17

I read an interesting essay (which I can dig up if anyone’s interested) regarding the ancient Greek mindset that nature wasn’t anything to be tampered with really. Thus, scientists were doing a good job about finding out about how stuff works, but really never considered putting the things to a “practical” use. For example, the Greeks knew enough in principle to create a steam engine…

18

Nah, I’ve already considered that and it’s not needed at all. I’m not gonna use a buzzer to receive the signal, I’m gonna use what got used for everything else in those days: the human body.

Remember these are the days of men who will work happily under pretty crappy conditions. Even a weak battery will produce a current that can be felt in the tongue. All you need to do is have the telegraph operator sit holding the exposed wire in his teeth to receive the signal perfectly clearly.

I’m serious. Such a job would be irritating as all hell, but it’s not actually dangerous. People do far worse work even today and back then were doing jobs that routinely killed them. People would actually be queuing up for a job that involved sitting down in the shade all day with nothing worse than a tingling tongue as the drawback.

And such human receivers needn’t even be scribes. Any uneducated peasant could do the job perfectly well provided they could put a short stroke on a stylus when they receive a short tingle and a long stroke when they receive a longer tingle. Then a scribe, who would of be more highly paid and less likely to be prepared to get zapped, could decode the scratches on the stylus and convert it into letters at his leisure.

I think this typifies one of the reasons people find it so hard to ‘invent’ things in these scenarios, they try to make things perfect imitations of the technology as it exists in our time. As this example shows that’s not necessary. All you need to do is recreate the effect of the technology, the exact process isn’t all that important.

Of course I also know that I could produce insulation fairly easily is I wanted to build a fairly bulky electromagnet/solenoid. Even the common edible fig of the Mediterranean produces latex in large enough amounts for this, but the Greeks were also familiar with the more typical fig trees of North Africa and Asia that can produce quite large quantities of latex. Not exactly top quality rubber but good enough for these purposes and who knows with a little fiddling I may even figure out vulcanisation.

19

For inventions to catch on, their usefulness needs to be immediately apparent. This makes a lot of revolutionary advances, like, say, the germ theory of disease, unlikely to catch on in Ancient Greece. What you need to invent is things that help out in obvious ways.
Did the Greeks use wind or water power? I’m thinking there’s some room here. Wind-powered water pumps shouldn’t be too difficult to devise, even using period craftsmanship. This can be used for irrigation, or just as a labour-saving device at the local well. Water-powered flour mills, or blacksmithing shops would probably be doable too.

20

True. The Greeks and Romans already had the technological means to develope quite a few revolutionary inventions but didn’t really seem all that interested in actually doing it. Hero(n) of Alexandria, who has already been mentioned in passing in this thread, was, in terms of what he invented, practically the Thomas Edison of his time. However, apparently nobody saw these devices as anything more than clever novelties and stage tricks. (One wonders if Hero(n) ever grew frustrated by the limited imagination of those around him who didn’t see the limitless potential for his discoveries.) The culture and economics of the first century Roman Empire were such that no one else (besides, possibly, Hero(n)) looked at something like the “automata” and said, “Hey! We could do a lot more with that device besides open doors!”

However, getting back to the OP, how about a compass?

BTW, the subject of this thread brings to mind a lot of what was covered in James Burke’s books and TV shows.