# The earliest year modern tech could be replicated (time traveler scenario) **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [March 12, 2018, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-earliest-year-modern-tech-could-be-replicated-time-traveler-scenario/810450 "2018-03-12T21:06:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2018, 1:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-earliest-year-modern-tech-could-be-replicated-time-traveler-scenario/810450/21 "2018-03-13T13:47:42Z")
> [@SamuelA](#): > > 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. That’s why I think it would work taking transistors back to a time when people were trying to make computers out of valves and telephony switches; the technology itself is relatively simple and macroscopic; semiconductor materials already existed, and it would have been like the last piece of a puzzle they had already nearly completed. A modern thing like an iPad would be nearly impossible to reverse engineer; modern electronics pretty much have to be destroyed to be understood at all. Discrete electronic components, especially early examples, are much more easily studied. ---
**Author:** ![Ashtura](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ashtura/32/2963_2.png) [@Ashtura](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ashtura)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2018, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-earliest-year-modern-tech-could-be-replicated-time-traveler-scenario/810450/22 "2018-03-13T16:54:03Z")
> [@Jonathan\_Chance](#): > > As anyone who reads the classics should know… > > 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. Agree with this. Bring back copper wire, a small [Hydroelectic generator](https://www.greenoptimistic.com/hydroelectric-generator/), and a primitive, edison era lightbulb, or the schmatics to make them, and I bet that would generate a huge interest, and within the realm of their skills (or would be soon). Harnessing electricity is the BIG one, as far as I’m concerned, to how rapidly we changed since the 19th century. ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2018, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-earliest-year-modern-tech-could-be-replicated-time-traveler-scenario/810450/23 "2018-03-13T17:55:41Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > \*‘Canned’ style transistors would be pretty easy to open and study without destroying them. The invention of transistors required processes to make _very_ pure silicon (called “five nines” for 99.999% pure). The concept goes back to cat’s whisker rectifiers in the teens and twenties. It wasn’t really the idea they were lacking, but the high quality silicon. The transistor was invented about the exact same time that it was possible to make silicon that was pure enough. My plan is to go much farther back. You could have a lot of influence introducing stirrups and heavy plows in ancient times, for example. Or even just introducing agriculture to people 100,000 years ago. If it counts for the OP, a person with a bachelor’s degree in science could revolutionize mathematics by teaching what they know to Euclid or Archimedes. Hell, just decimal numbers and the concept of zero would radically change the course of mathematics, so even a grade schooler could do it. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2018, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-earliest-year-modern-tech-could-be-replicated-time-traveler-scenario/810450/24 "2018-03-13T18:23:38Z")
> [@jtur88](#): > > 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. 10 or 12 years perhaps. When I got bar mitzvahed in 1964 I got a transistor radio, and all my friends got one also. And the people who gave us them didn’t have to go deep in their pockets to pay for them. Transistors were cheap back then - 6 or 8 orders of magnitude more expensive than today, true, but still cheap. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2018, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-earliest-year-modern-tech-could-be-replicated-time-traveler-scenario/810450/25 "2018-03-13T18:28:04Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > 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. Vacuum tubes were probably more reliable than very early transistors, and had the benefit of it being easy to see if they failed. As for speed, the computer I used in High School was an LGP-21, a transistorized version of the LGP-30. It was slower. It was built in 1962, the LGP-30 1956 or 1957. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2018, 6:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-earliest-year-modern-tech-could-be-replicated-time-traveler-scenario/810450/26 "2018-03-13T18:35:32Z")
Your introduction of agriculture in 100,000 BC suffers from the same problem as the transistor. Hunter-gatherers understand that plants propagate from seeds or roots. So the concept isn’t lacking, it’s the economic incentives to undertake the work of farming that are lacking. And of course we’re dealing with wild plants, which are much much less productive in producing human food than modern varieties, or ancient varieties for that matter. Agriculture wasn’t a matter of getting the blinding flash of insight to take some of the seeds from this fall’s gathering and put them in the ground on purpose where they would grow for next year. They knew that’s what happened. The problem is that your ancestral wild grass that will eventually become modern wheat doesn’t exist. Instead you’ve got a wild grass with slightly enlarged seeds. When it’s the right season you come in and gather some seeds, and maybe even store them for a while, but you don’t base your whole economy on planting those seeds on every surface, tending them carefully for the summer, harvesting them in fall, storing the seeds, and then living off them for the entire year while waiting for the next harvest. You don’t do that unless you have no other choice. So neolithic agriculture didn’t work like that. Instead they planted some crops, gathered wild plants, tended some domestic animals, and hunted wild animals. But eventually the wild areas where you used to hunt and gather get turned into farmland by your neighbors, and your available wild foods start to dwindle. And so you have to farm your cropland more and more intensively as other sources start to disappear. So your paleolithic hunter-gatherers aren’t going to see much point in neolithic farming because the economics won’t favor it. Just like it won’t do any good to bring back plans for steam engines until metallurgy and manufacturing infrastructure are advanced enough to build something that won’t leak and explode. Before you can create a fleet of steam engines you need to be able to produce steel in industrial quantities. Before you can do that you need to be able to mine coal and iron ore in industrial quantities. You can’t kick off an industrial revolution in Ancient Rome just by showing them a steam engine and stepping back, because the socioeconomic infrastructure wouldn’t exist to support it. ---
**Author:** ![Quercus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/7ab992/32.png) [@Quercus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quercus)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2018, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-earliest-year-modern-tech-could-be-replicated-time-traveler-scenario/810450/27 "2018-03-13T18:47:23Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > My plan is to go much farther back. You could have a lot of influence introducing stirrups and heavy plows in ancient times, for example. Or even just introducing agriculture to people 100,000 years ago. I generally agree that any kind of even semi-modern invention needs a lot of infrastructure, and people in the past weren’t any dumber than us, etc. But stirrups are one thing that I can’t figure out why they weren’t used earlier. I can’t think of why Romans couldn’t have produced them, or why Roman cavalry wouldn’t have found them very useful. And the concept seems simple enough that it wouldn’t take a one-in-a-billion genius to think of it. But no Roman (or contemporary) stirrups as far as we can tell. They’re useless well before Rome, in the chariot era, since horses were mostly too small to ride individually, but Romans rode horses. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2018, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-earliest-year-modern-tech-could-be-replicated-time-traveler-scenario/810450/28 "2018-03-13T18:58:31Z")
The problem with stirrups is that you could inadvertently end up favoring the steppe nomads over settled people. If you’re trying to advance science and technology and civilization that’s the exact opposite of what you want. Better off teaching the Romans how to build a modern horse collar. ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2018, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-earliest-year-modern-tech-could-be-replicated-time-traveler-scenario/810450/29 "2018-03-13T19:04:45Z")
> [@Quercus](#): > > I generally agree that any kind of even semi-modern invention needs a lot of infrastructure, and people in the past weren’t any dumber than us, etc. > > But stirrups are one thing that I can’t figure out why they weren’t used earlier. I can’t think of why Romans couldn’t have produced them, or why Roman cavalry wouldn’t have found them very useful. And the concept seems simple enough that it wouldn’t take a one-in-a-billion genius to think of it. But no Roman (or contemporary) stirrups as far as we can tell. They’re useless well before Rome, in the chariot era, since horses were mostly too small to ride individually, but Romans rode horses. The important part of stirrups isn’t the stirrup itself, but the saddle. Ancient saddles were basically just blankets. Put stirrups on a blanket and you just cut into the horse’s back, injuring them and causing pain. It does seem like a sturdy saddle that spreads out the load shouldn’t have taken until the middle ages to invent, though. ---
**Author:** ![Projammer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/projammer/32/559_2.png) [@Projammer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Projammer)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2018, 6:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-earliest-year-modern-tech-could-be-replicated-time-traveler-scenario/810450/30 "2018-03-17T06:04:08Z")
I think I’ll drop off a details set of plans for the Gutenberg press at the library of Alexandria. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2018, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-earliest-year-modern-tech-could-be-replicated-time-traveler-scenario/810450/31 "2018-03-17T15:30:11Z")
You may want to bring a recipe for paper as well. The first paper mill in Germany preceded Gutenberg’s invention by only a few decades. China had paper centuries earlier, and also developed a movable-type press (with porcelain instead of metal types) centuries before Gutenberg! ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2018, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-earliest-year-modern-tech-could-be-replicated-time-traveler-scenario/810450/32 "2018-03-17T16:15:31Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > 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. > > Stranger > [@Lemur866](#): > > 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. Looking into it, the first revolver style weapon was created in germany in the 16th century which is about 270 years before revolvers with all in one cartridges in the 1850s. > **[Revolver | History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolver#History)** > > In the development of firearms, an important limiting factor was the time required to reload the weapon after it was fired. While the user was reloading, the weapon was useless, allowing an adversary to attack the user. Several approaches to the problem of increasing the rate of fire were developed, the earliest involving multi-barrelled weapons which allowed two or more shots without reloading. Later weapons featured multiple barrels revolving along a single axis. > A matchlock revolver with a si... > [@](#): > > The earliest examples of what today is called a revolver were made in Germany in the late 16th century. These weapons featured a single barrel with a revolving cylinder holding the powder and ball. They would soon be made by many European gun-makers, in numerous designs and configurations.[2] However, these weapons were difficult to use, complicated and prohibitively expensive to make, and as such they were not widely distributed. So it seems like it was possible to build repeating weapons as early as the 16th century, but as they said they were complicated, expensive and hard to use. Anyway, what about the steam engine? That started the industrial revolution, and there were examples of steam powered turbines going back to Roman times. I wonder if a basic steam engine in Greco Roman times would jump start the industrial revolution. But then again, without the knowledge of calculus and physics developed in the 17th century would they be able to build industry around a steam engine? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-earliest-year-modern-tech-could-be-replicated-time-traveler-scenario/810450.md?page=1)