An interesting fact: the lenses that Leeuwenhoek used for the first observations of micro-organisms didn’t really come from grinding. He would melt a thin whisker of glass to create a tiny spherical droplet to put in his microscopes.
Yes, a collective “we” though. The average Englishman stands on the shoulders of giants.
However you choose to present the lesson, basic sanitation is the big thing. If you could just get people to bathe and clean up their garbage, the rats and lice that lead to plague could be kept in check.
And ANY kind of sewage system could prevent typhoid and a host of other diseases.
Those are things that wouldn’t require specialized knowledge or skills, and that almost any modern Englishman could teach.
I agree, while the average Englishman knows that there exists a black powder that exists and goes boom when you light it, most probably don’t have the vaguest idea how to make it, nor how to grind the glass to make a telescope, how to make a steam engine etc. For the most part all he would know is that they are possible (which is a pretty big first step), but it would take years of research to bring any one of them about.
It really depends. If we’ve already established that he’s not going to be thought of as a heretic or magical, he might be able to get somewhere. He can go around sprouting ideas from the modern world but I doubt anyone would believe him. I don’t think the concept of time travel was even known at that time. First step is to DO something. Show that you have something to give them, something valuable and you might start to get somewhere. Unfortunately our world is so interconnected that an individual doesn’t have much knowledge that can function by itself. Sure, you know how to use a computer and drive a car, but those things don’t mean much. If he’s smart, he’ll start by not saying anything to upsetting or heretical, and he probably shouldn’t explain that he’s from the future. If he happens to have some technology that isn’t TOO advanced, he might be able to pass as a REALLY bright inventor, assuming he holds back the more modern stuff until he gets a bit further.
Now if he could smuggle some modern information with him, say an electronic encyclopedia or something, that might be a different story. There are certainly some things that could revolutionize their world that are not terribly hard to make, (like gunpowder) but I’m not sure the average Englishman knows how to make it either (iirc, like 75% charcoal, 15% sulfur, 10% potassium nitrate?) he’d have to know what salt peter looked like as well, which isn’t easy.
He might be able to start with something simple like sterilizing wounds and the beginnings of proper sanitation. Being able to prevent gangrene or infections would probably be pretty impressive (and useful) to these people, so if he could start as some sort of sage with real results he might be able to get the respect to build from there.
But plenty of Englishmen know the main ingredients of gun powder, and you’d team up with some alchemist to do experiments. Similarly, you’d find a craftsman who was good at glassworks and explain the general idea of a lens-- let the experts of the day leapfrog.
Is there any evidence whatsoever that eleventh-century Britons burned witches?
This is the key. Those people weren’t stupid. Give them a bit of future knowledge and a nudge in the right direction and let them do all the heavy lifting.
Combine that with the likelihood that you’ll be considered a weird foreigner anyway, with tales like “In a distant land, I saw a piece of glass of a curious shape…”
First thing would be to keep a low profile until you could fit in. You would always be a ‘foreigner’ but that may be no bad thing.
Best idea would be to find someone who was working on anything at all that you vaguely recognise, and steer them in the right direction. You could say that it’s something you leaned ‘back home’ - maybe start some kind of business to gain a reputation.
Then you need a wealthy patron. There were some who were interested in technology and you could probably come up with enough good ideas to enable him to promote them (as his - obviously).
I’m not an average Englishman, but if you wanted a list of simple changes that could revolutionize the time, in the 11th century, European blacksmiths weren’t able to melt iron (1538 C) and so instead used bloomeries to produce an iron bloom which they could forge down into wrought iron (~0% carbon). Fires just couldn’t get hot enough to raise the ore over the critical point to liquify it, so making steels was very difficult, and all metal working had to be done by forging instead of casting. Hooking the bellows of the forge up to a water wheel in a river allowed large bellows to pump enough oxygen into the forges and later blast furnaces for the iron to melt. The blast furnace process produces pig iron (if cast directly as pig iron, the result is known as cast iron), a brittle high-carbon iron alloy that can be reduced to steel with the application of oxygen to burn off excess carbon. It also allows for casting into molds (which can later be forged) for quicker production of (higher) quality tools.
Not usable all that frequently, but useful: the Heimlich maneuver.
Also, “back to sleep” for infants.
Multiple photographic, microfiche and audio sources, actually.
I wouldn’t (and probably couldn’t) give them advanced technology, but perhaps I could give them ideas for things that they could implement with what they had. For instance, I would try to get someone interested in the idea of the horse collar, which was a vast improvement over the yoke. I could ask a blacksmith to make a helical drill bit and then see if some carpenter thought it worked better. Heck, maybe I could find a water wheel and invent the tumbler rock polisher, and make a living selling polished pebbles as cheap jewelry.
Dendarii Dame beat me to the Heimlich Maneuver.
You could teach them perspective drawing, but it’s unclear whether they would value it.
What I would do is tell them that I came from a faraway land where the wise knew many great secrets, but that I was not one of the wise myself. Then I would try to write down absolutely everything I could recall of modern scientific knowledge. The brilliant minds of the eleventh century might be able to use my imperfect recollections as clues to the truth, accelerating the development of science.
That’s a good one, vanishing points and all that. I guess you’d have to find a bright 11th-century architect to demonstrate your “discovery” to.
Even 50-odd years before the invasion, you wouldn’t be telling them anything they didn’t already know or could reasonably suspect. They’d already had problems with the Normans.
In late August of 1015, though, they had more pressing problems, in the shape of Cnut of Denmark invading with 10,000 pissed-off Vikings, Edmund Ironsides attempting to usurp his father Æthelred’s throne, and no way of knowing which one of them any particular earl’s going to decide to side with.
This is not a good year for poorly-prepared time travellers.
That leads directly into the principal ethical conundrum of time travel: how much do you change the past? For example, the shortages of labor caused by the Black Death in the 1340s led pretty directly to the end of serfdom in England by 1400. Good sanitation = no plague = no end to feudalism (or at least a longer period of feudalism before something else ended it).
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I mentioned it in the other thread, but it fits here too:
Get thee to YouTube and listen to Good Advice by Allan Sherman. He sets a lot of important inventors and discoverers on the right track, with but one horrific and tragic blunder.
And ever since, Englishmen have called such assholish people cnuts.