You’ve been charged with selecting one everyday modern tech object (smartphone, computer, your George Forman grill – no large hadron colliders unless you have one in your house) and carrying it to a past year. The hope is that delivering the object to the past will have a profound effect in our era.
What object will you take and why?
What’s the earliest year you think the object could be successfully reproduced? As in, materials are available that, upon studying the object, experts could make parts for and assemble.
What effect(s) would possessing this tech in the past have on our lives/world in general today?
Well, if the modern tech item is electronic and you plan to alter the course of history for the U.S. or Canada, you’re probably better off not going back further than the establishment of the 120-Volt 60-Hertz electrical standard, unless you want to bring a AC generator with you, too, in which case you can’t go back further than the invention of the fuel for the generator, be it diesel or gasoline or whatever.
If you’re in Europe, you should make sure you don’t go back further than the availability of 50Hz AC, should your tech item need it.
You probably have little chance of reverse-engineering the item itself. If it was a laptop computer, I’d load it up with detailed schematics, animations and videos of each stage of invention from the transistor (and all common variants thereof) onward, including details on each stage of computer memory, computer displays, computer printing, computer storage, etc. and aim for 1930 or so, where I could “invent” these things in rapid order. Presumably I’d be hailed as the new Edison, but my invention process will have to remain to the outside world as much a black box as my laptop itself. I couldn’t risk it being discovered and possibly taken from me by someone who wouldn’t be able to use it, or wouldn’t be able to grasp its awesome potential or, worse of all, destroy it out of fear or ignorance.
A lot of our modern tech requires understanding of science that didn’t exist until the 20th century or so. So you probably can’t go that far back.
The scientific infrastructure to understand technology is fairly recent. My understanding is Newtonian physics and calculus came about in the 17th century, chemistry in the 19th century and quantum mechanics in the 20th century. You need those to build smartphones and computers. I don’t even know when metallurgy really became a competent field.
A piece of useful technology to take back with you would probably be some kind of antiseptic. Either just vodka, or a mold extract like penicillin. If you are looking to have the biggest impact on history, teaching people about germ theory and/or the basics of agriculture and nutrition would accomplish the most.
Part of me wonders why it took so long to create repeating firearms or firearms where the bullet and powder were encased together. Guns go back to the 13th century at least, but it wasn’t until the mid-late 19th century that you started seeing firearms where the bullets and gunpowder came pre-packaged together and you had repeating rifles, automatic handguns, pump shotguns, etc. rather than guns where you had to separately load the gunpowder and projectile.
Lots of that kind of advance depended on precision metallurgy and machining.
Everyone could see that a breech-loading rifle would be a huge improvement over a muzzle loader. But it was really hard to actually make one that worked. And even if you could make one that worked, it required such precision work that it was many times more expensive to manufacture. So do you want to equip a squad of 10 guys with breech loaders, or 100 guys with muzzle loaders.
This sort of thing happens over and over again. The idea for an invention often happens long before the economic infrastructure exists to manufacture a working model of the invention. And the working model of the invention often happens long before the economic infrastructure exists to create a profitable business making and selling the invention.
It’s one thing to have the idea, it’s another thing to build it. It’s one thing to build it, it’s another to make money building it. And it’s one thing to successfully make a luxury product, it’s another thing to turn that luxury product into a mass market product.
So…taking an iPhone back to 1985 isn’t going to do any good, because there aren’t any factories that can produce the components of the iPhone. The engineers of 1985 will be able to take that thing apart and figure out exactly how everything works, but they won’t be able to make anything like it because the real advances weren’t the idea of the iPhone, it was the thousands of industrial improvements in electronics manufacturing that allowed us to cram all those components into a hand-held device instead of a medium-sized room.
Sorry to fight the hypothetical. There really are devices that could change history because the idea itself was revolutionary. The sewing machine is a good example, although that wasn’t so much one idea as a whole bunch of ideas compressed into one machine, and in fact conflicting patents on all the various components made it impossible to manufacture. Then all the patent-holders got together and formed the Singer consortium. That could have happened decades earlier.
Roman times. The telegraph and basic electricity generation. The romans had some primitive batteries and some minor uses. But never quite made the leap.
Go back to 200AD or so and work with them to use the copper wiring and extended their knowledge. That would give us the industrial revolution about 1200 years earlier. You want an iPhone prior to 1985? Get the ball rolling and wait for some 6th century Stevus Jobsius to get the job done in 200 years.
Boom. By the time the 21st century comes around, we’re either interplanetary or dead, either way.
You don’t technically need quantum mechanics to build digital computers, but you do need an enormous amount of process information in order to make the materials and components that go into a modern smartphone or other device that cannot simply be derived from basic scientific principles. Actually knowing how to develop all of these manufacturing and processing technologies and their obligate precursors is such a vast body of knowledge that it is probably beyond what any one person could possibly master, regardless of how much information you could carry with you. ‘Doc’ Brown isn’t going to be building any time machines in 1885, and you aren’t going to build an iPhone in 1955, or even 1985, without bringing along all of that manufacturing infrastructure intact.
Well, maybe. People have understood practical nutrition long before it was any kind of science, and the germ theory of disease is useful for understanding things like how outbreaks occur and spread but the essentials of public santiation are largely predicated on being able to maintain large scale systems for providing clean water, removing sewage and other wastes quickly, and treating outbreaks rapidly before they can spread. Practical nutrition in agriculture requires being able to maintain fertile soil and until the 20th century the only way to do this was using manure. Chemical synthesis of fertilizer (e.g. the Haber-Bosch process of ammonia fixing) requires significant industrial capability, which necessitates having tubing and piping as well as good process control and measurement, so it couldn’t have occurred much before the late 19th century in any case.
Loaded cartridges and repeating rifles require high precision in manufacture which requires regular tooling, as well as specific technologies such as percussion caps and swaging tools. This, again, requires precursors, because you use tools to make tools, and so there is a process of accumulating knowledge and building tool-making tools of increasing precision until you are able to make things like machine screws, drawn wire, and precision forged components. Nobody will build a Henry repeating rifle using a 17th century blacksmith’s shop because the tools just don’t exist to build for that kind of precision.
If you really want early adoption, a telescope is going to be a better option, due to the obvious military applications. Once the telescope gets adopted, the microscope is a follow-up technology.
Or get a microscope into Galen’s hands and get him into animacules rather than humours.
If you bring an iPhone back to 1985, when we were using 1.25 micron process technology, and they started working on improving things, they’d probably get one around - 2015. You need improved process technology but also improved design and verification and test technology, all of which grow slowly and much of which depend on the latest in processor technology. 1985 era computers couldn’t even hold the design in memory.
The display technology on an iPhone is also going to be out of reach of someone in 1985.
If you were going back further than that, I think it would be best to send an old vacuum tube computer. They’d be a lot easier to reproduce, teach the basics, and soon jump start the culture into better technology.
Bicycles. People might not be able to precision manufacture the chains or wire spokes, but they’d get the general idea of a vertical wheeled frame propelled by the rider, and wooden bikes are a thing. Of course, you’d need to get them to engineer fairly smooth roads first, which is probably the sticking point.
I wonder, how far back could you take the birth control pill and have someone figure out what made it work and start producing them? Wouldn’t it be pretty simple chemistry to reverse engineer?
Before the transistor (1947), nothing today would be within the realm of imagination, much less possibility. Even then, few Americans were even in possession of a transistor-equipped device until maybe 20 years later.
Am I allowed to take a textbook back? How about taking a text on basic chemistry or electro-magnetism back to the early 18th century? I’d rely on the geniuses of that era to do all the work, with the textbook just providing inspiration.
If allowed only one object, I’d look for a general science book that covers both chemistry and electro-magnetism. Let the 18th-century natives re-invent needed details; just provide basic facts and laws.
oohh–I just thought of somethin’ neato!
How about a hang glider?
Yeah, it works best with aluminum and nylon. But maybe you could make one with a bamboo frame and animal skins?
Imagine Alexander the Great flying over his empire.
Proving that human flight was possible would be a huge boost to the ancients’ imagination, maybe stimulating scientific developments.
I’m thinking that this might actually lead to the most practical idea - take a device with lots of discrete components - a bit of 1970s/80s transistorised* consumer electronics (say a TV or a bit of consumer HiFi) and drop it into Bletchley Park at the point where they were trying to build computers out of relays and thermionic valves - this is only a few years before the actual invention of the transistor, but quite a pivotal moment, and a small lead there could translate to a big downstream change.
*‘Canned’ style transistors would be pretty easy to open and study without destroying them.
Even if you could bring back limitless documentation, the real problem is infrastructure.
You need this huge supply chain to actually make anything from the modern world. Not just a supply chain, but thousands of unique technical skills.
I think that if you could bring back all the knowledge of mankind (let’s just pretend you can bring dozens of solid state laptops with a means to recharge them and they are loaded with all of mankind’s knowledge as searchable pdfs) you still couldn’t make as much progress as you think, no matter the era.