An Englishman from year 2015 is somehow catapulted one thousand years back in time. Given they don’t burn him as a witch, what could he teach to those people? Let’s say he is not very intellectual guy but he has an average IQ. He passed high school 20 years ago but didn’t study much after that. He works as a salesman and his hobbies are his museum car and fishing.
I hope this is factual question enough for General questions section.
A complete map of the world and pictures of the planets would probably be a revelation.
His knowledge of Arabic numerals and their benefits over Roman numerals.
Nobody would understand you, especially pre-Norman invasion. Your accent would also be foreign to them pre Great Vowel Shift. Unless you could speak passable Latin and pass yourself off as a priest you’d have to try and understand Late Old English, which reads like this;
- ‘Ðunor cymð of hætan & of wætan. Seo lyft tyhð þone wætan to hire neoðan & ða hætan ufan.’*
From Ælfric of Eynsham, who died circa 1010 A.D.
Add to this your height and relatively healthy teeth and they’d think you were a foreigner.
Then you whip out your cell phone and you’d either be burned to death or become the basis of a religion.
Missed the edit window, you might be interested in the short story The Man Who Came Early by Poul Anderson. It’s about an American GI and engineer transported back to Viking Iceland. I won’t spoil it too much but it’s definitely worth a read for fans of time-travel. Since Icelandic has changed relatively little he is able to communicate, but things…go badly. His attempts at modern inventions fail as he can’t even make the tools to make the tools. He also makes a number of cultural faux-pas, unable to translate modern concepts to the time.
an extremely valuable thing he could pass on is the concept of germ theory and it’s implications. E.g stay away from contagious people, wash your hands, food safety, etc.
Also, he should tell them to stay away from doctors and blood-letting, and mercury and silver treatments.
They could definitely teach them how to make a damn good sandwich and have it be named after them.
Good luck trying to convince people that invisible animalcules cause disease. This guy pioneered what we’d see as modern hygiene in the middle of the 19th Century and ended up dying in obscurity in an insane asylum.
Besides which, everyone would tell you that they already knew that the reasons for disease. Variably caused by divine wrath for personal redemptive experience, movements of the astronomical bodies, the four humours being out of balance and thus requiring bloodletting, or (most sensibly to us) the spread of miasmata, ‘bad air’.
Where to begin…
First, pick up Old English. Wouldn’t be too hard-- probably pretty fluent in a year or so.
Grind glass to make lenses. Aim at stars and at water. Note planets and note micro-organisms.
Helio-centric solar system.
Germ theory of disease. The importance of a sewer system.
Algebra (already mentioned), but probably not calculus. The average Englishman wouldn’t know that.
Moveable type.
Gun powder.
Electricity: A rotating wire in a magnet.
Sterilization.
Evolution by natural selection
Steam engine.
That’s enough for now…
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watch out for the damned Normans
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don’t trust anyone from Normandy
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especially if his name is “William”
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never fight a battle any place called “Hastings”
Agreed, French lessons.
Since your cellphone would glow interestingly until its battery ran down, but would otherwise have no function, I can’t see that the locals would be all that impressed, one way or the other.
Teach them to wash their damn hands!
Forget germ theory - tell them washing removes earthly stain from your hands, so doing before prayer or eating or tending the sick will bring your closer to God and thus favor your endeavor. Use an argument in terms they’ll understand.
It would also likely have a camera, a music player, and a voice recorder, all of which would be seen as miraculous (or diablocal) in 1015 A.D.
The many benefits of the cultivation of the indian hemp plant.
Unless my cellphone still accessed this information after the time travel, I would have difficulty reinventing a lot of this. For instance, I know the importance of a sewer system on a layman’s level, but if I just said something about “germs” to them, it wouldn’t help much at all and how would I convince them to construct a sewer system? I would have to learn from them how to make soap, absent cellphone information, since I just buy it in a store.
Related current thread in IMHO.
Also I could tell them that the earth revolves around the sun in layman’s terms, but without the detailed theory of Copernicus so maybe I’d escape any charges of heresy and just get a healthy dose of ridicule.
That’s why we grind glass and make microscopes. --JM