It’s going to be a bitch to lift, but I’ll take 1906 gold Double Eagles, and set me down in what will be Reseda, CA. I’m gonna beat Bob Hope to all the land in the San Fernando Valley.
Sunspace has pointed out a problem with this plan. I have another. You seem to be planning to stay in the past for a fairly brief time (yes?), which means you’re placing a lot of trust in these minions. If they’re buying oil leases and such for you in your absence in the years between your past visit and now, then it won’t be long before someone says, "Hey, I’ve got these instructions that seem to be foretelling the future. I’m not gonna keep enriching somebody else. Fuck that shit.
I think you have to stay in the past long enough to amass your stake, and then go the Swiss bank route (or convert it to diamonds and bring it back with you when RhymerInc comes to pick you up at the appointed time & date). But you’re not gonna find somebody you can trust with this future knowledge in your absence.
Well, Aslan. But he won’t do it.
I’m thinking that in addition to the sports book (great idea) and the oil maps (great idea), and depending on when I go, I may take a big chunk of aluminum for seed money. Prior to the Hall-Héroult process (1886) Aluminum was as valuable as (or more valuable than) Gold or Silver.
On a side note, in 1884 the Washington Monument was capped with a precious 100 oz aluminum capstone.
Wait a minute here. Is the goal to make a fortune and live on it in the past? If so, the task it really too easy. All you need is some seed money and stock market reports from the weeks and months ahead.
Now… if the goal is to build a fortune that will survive to the present day, so that you are essentially born rich, well that’s a much tougher task. You;d have to have a rule that you have to go far enough back in time so time traveling you will be gone before real you arrives.
Really, the money making task is just as easy (some cash and stock market reports). The problem becomes protecting the money from intervening generations of stupid relatives and financial predators.
I figured you just wanted us to list unusual things. Guns and ammo are to be assumed pretty much any time I hop into one of your time traveling devices.
Yllaria beat me to it, but I’d just take the most detailed book I could find on the Dutch tulip craze, and enough gold bullion to get set up on the tulip exchange. Sell out the day before the bubble bursts, convert the cash back to bullion, and head home. I won’t end up controlling all of North America and Canada, like Oakminster plans, but I’ll come back with enough cash to live in luxury for the rest of my life.
Actually, instead of gold, I’d probably take precious gems. More portable, so I won’t have to rely on (possibly untrustworthy) goons to carry my giant box of gold for me.
Also, a 9mm and a couple boxes of ammo.
I checked the OP again, and it says you get to decide how long you’ll stay in the past; to me that implies you can say, “Drop me in California in 1844 and let me stay,” and the Evil Inc tech will shrug & say, “whatever dude.”
Seems risky. Just because you’re immunized against every illness you can think of doesn’t mean you’re protected against getting killed other ways, and you don’t have any support, either. Unless several of y’all form a coalition. And you can’t count on Evil Inc to care, on account of them being Evil Inc. I mean, they’re just looking to screw up the time stream with minimal effort on their own part.
What’s wrong with a nice, simple lottery ticket? If you go for sports book, then sooner or later, someone’s going to notice that some schlub is getting way too many longshot bets right, and you’ll be paid a visit by some nice legitimate businessmen and their overly-muscled employees (as Kevyn Andreyasn is currently finding out). But with a lotto, you can win your wealth all at once, so nobody would notice a pattern of repeat winnings. Then, you either convert it to gold and bury it somewhere you can find later, or convert it to gold and bring it back with you in the duffel when you return (if that’s allowed). At most, you put it into some modestly well-performing investment (something that does a little better than the index, but nothing dramatic like getting in on the ground floor with Microsoft), managed by a reputable banker.
I’m going to fill that duffel with gold and silver and jewels. And a sextant and compass and a shovel. And lists of major lost works of classical literature. The ebook reader / iPad and solar recharger too. Give me a pistol and AK47 and ammo on top.
Because I’m going to go back to Roman Alexandria and going to buy copies of those lost works. Then I’ll head out into the Sahara and bury them. Deep. Return to my own time and go and recover them.
Here’s a list of the oldest companies in the world. Might be handy if you decide you need to invest your 1623 cash in cymbals or your 1670 money in the beaver pelt industry.
I’d advise against taking modern weapons. Prolly don’t want to leave spent shell casings from a weapon that hadn’t been invented yet. Also, if something happens and the trip takes longer that you’d expect, you want something you can resupply with ammo. My beloved .357 magnum did not exist at the time, so I’m thinking a .44 rifle/pistol combo package. Both weapons use the same round, so I only need one type of ammo, and that should be easy to find around the turn of the century.
While I agree that you want a weapon whose ammo you can resupply whenever you go, I don’t quite get the concern about spent shell casings. What was there in the way of forensic ballistics in 1910 or before?
And if you get arrested, you’re probably screwed no matter what.
A 20th-century pharmacopoeia would probably set you up pretty well at the beginning of the 16th century. Pain relief, antibiotics, contraception… I am confident that marketable goods could be produced without much in the way of dependencies.
More ambitiously, I would* love* to be the guy who’s standing by ready to build a packet-switching network (and devices to run on it) while Marconi is still doing trial-and-error. Long list of dependencies, to work through, though - you’d need a pretty good plan to keep fed while you work through those. I guess I’d crib from those above and bring back one secured device with the grand plan nicely encrypted on it, and be really careful about selecting one wealthy person as an investor. First, AC - then transistors, then IC’s, CRT’s… DRAM… simple microprocessor… opportunity to improve on the TCP/IP protocol suite by rebuilding it with the intent to create a global network from the start.
Modern shell casings, in calibers and/or made of substances that did not exist at the time would possibly establish that time travel exists, and almost inevitably lead to one of those nasty paradoxes…or change history in unpredictable ways. Howard Carter would have been rather surprised to find, say, plastic shotgun shells…in Tut’s burial chamber. The non-explosive part of shotgun shells of the time was made of paper…
Not only did lots of weapons not exist, lots of databases about weapons didn’t exist. People would just assume you had some exotic foreign weapon. No one would assume time travel
Surely, stock reports won’t work that well in a model of time travel that allows branching timelines/changes to the past. Your very actions in making large movements in the market will presumably cause all kinds of changes throwing off the accuracy of the histories you depend on.
I’d stick to inventing things, if I knew anything I could invent. (Well, within my particular field (mathematics/computer science), I would quickly become one of the all-time greats, I suppose, but it probably wouldn’t be that lucrative, just prestigious…)
Grays sports almanac
That and a book on stock market/investment history for whatever time period I went into. Invest in bubbles, then short sell before they burst. Wash/rinse/repeat.
Then leave the money to my kids with a message about investing in dell, microsoft, etc. in the 80s.
That is what I was going to say and it is a major fallacy almost all science fiction writers make and the people in this thread are making. Let’s say you take your sports results back to 1910 and start betting. The betting part doesn’t even matter that much either but it helps the alternate history part along faster. Your very presence started changing history the moment you arrived and it won’t stay the same way it was before for long in the same way the route you chose to go to work today and when you left helps determine who will die this weekend. That is just basic chaos theory.
Sports betting and especially the stock market are incredibly susceptible to this effect because they are organized around chaos theory even before anyone knew the term so tiny changes echo through the system, are permanent once they happen, and become more pronounced in effect over time.
Your sports pages and stock prices are useless pretty soon after you arrive and start giving inputs, no matter how small, into it.
This came up in a previous time travel thread, but you do realize that you need money from the period, right? How do you think your redesigned money from the 21st century is going to play in early 20th century banks?
Be very, very careful with this one. You might (or might not) be able to get away with pain relief and antibiotics, but contraceptives will almost certainly get you labeled a witch. And even if you carefully pick a tolerant time and place, there have always been plenty of folks selling medicines to cure any old thing: You’re not going to get many customers until you prove that yours work better, and it’s going to be hard to prove yours work better until you sell a bunch. You’d be better off with a bunch of alcohol and some funny-tasting herbs, and good salesmanship skills (which is, after all, what most of the successful medicine vendors had).