The Birth of Isreal 1947-1948 and the Reaction thereto by the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle (my masters’ thesis) to me in January 1987 (that way I would not have had to put all that work into the long-winded piece of academic rambling).
The Collected Columns of TV Time to me in 1990. This way I would not have to come up with a new column every week or at least I could have dropped some of the really bad ones.
The Collected Works of Jack Chick to Jack Chick’s parents before his conception. Maybe they would consider either birth control or even abortion after they read them.
Funny you should bring this up, because since I was a child I have always had a fantasy to bring an encyclopedia back to show Benjamin Franklin. What is simple heresay to us would fascinate him.
Send back scrolls (there were no bound books at the time) to the Romans about 50BC detailing various medeival innovations: the mouldboard plow, the horseshoe, the horse collar, the spinning wheel, the horizontal loom, the fireplace with chimney, the rudder, knitting wool, etc. All these have in common that they would transform the colder northern frontier of the Empire from hostile outposts to thriving (and taxable) centers of production. This would advance northern Europe as a center of trade and civilization by nearly 1400 years.
Send back to either the Eastern or (if still around) the Western empire, circa 500 AD, books about the reintroduction of the pike square to allow infantry to defend against mounted cavalry. Bypass 1000 years of “the knight is supreme on the battlefield”.
Just to be ornery here, I am really not sure the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics would advance civilization all that much. It is not like it has a whole lot of understanding and comprehension packed in there. It is mainly tables of properties of various materials. Mundane facts more than fundamental knowledge and understanding. Not that I don’t find it useful but I just tend to think of it as a useful tool in an advanced scientific civilization rather than such a great tool for actually advancing a civilization that doesn’t yet have the scientific basis to really make use of the knowledge of what the optical constants of molybdenum and zirconium are as a function of wavelength (which happens to be what I looked up in it yesterday).
You realize, of course, that if you did this, all the chivalrous and inspiring tales of knights – St. George and the Dragon, the Arthurian legends, etc. – would never be told. And thus Tolkien wouldn’t have had anything to go on, and thus AD&D would never have been invented, and then no one would ever be able to brag about how high the “plus” is on his two-handed sword or how many hit points he has.
of course the people would have to be able to read the book and i don’t know chinese. if a book was sent to china around 500 b.c. which would advance their knowledge os science about 1000 years, what would be the dominant culture on this planet today. can’t understand why they didn’t colonize australia. they brought giraffes back from africa. to bad the written form of chinese is so hard to learn.
Send a book on sound-based systems of writing back to the ancient Chinese. Eliminate all the headaches of the written form of Chinese. Then, all the time every Chinese person would have otherwise spent learning 3000-5000 written characters would instead have been spent conquering the known universe!
But remember, there’s no such thing as “Chinese” as a single language, even today. One reason their written language remained non-alphabetic was so people from various regions could all read and write the standard characters, even if their spoken tounges were mutually unintelligable.
A leather bound into one, copy of ** Games People Play,I’m OK, You’re OK, and What do you say after you say “Hello”** in the WAY BACK machine to Sigmund Freud hisself.
There just might be the chance that ol’ Siggy and his buddies can get this stuff right the first time.
“And remember, fellow Seantors, Phonecia still stands!”
I seem remember from my Jr. High ancient history class that there were no less than 3 names given to that region and its people – Carthage, Phonecians, and Punic. Confusing as hades (dis?), let me tell you.
i tried playing chinese chess. remembering the characters was harder than playing the game. let’s see. there were canons, elephants, palace gaurds. the general vs the scholar and the elephants couldn’t cross the river. i think there were a couple more pieces.
have to send lots of batteries. i know, solar power.
I’d take a copy of the Jersey City telephone directory and slap a leather cover on it that reads, in Latin, “How to Build a Time Machine by Chance the Gardener, A.D. 2002.” I’d drop this off around 300 AD or so. Whoever receives the book would never be able to figure out the “plans” of how to build a time machine but would be convinced that it’s possible, since this book clearly came from about 1700 years in the future and clearly outlines how to build a time machine.
Inspired by the apparent certainty that time travel is possible, scientists would set to work on time travel, figure it out, and then seek me out, since my name and the year I’m living in is inscribed on the book. They’d surely be grateful enough to share with me their time-travel technology, which I could use to then shuffle all sorts of books and other things all over history, screwing up the space-time continuum once and for all.
However, my first stop would be to the year 1963, to give John Kennedy Toole a published copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, so that he doesn’t give up hope.
