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.
Agree with this. Bring back copper wire, a small Hydroelectic 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?