Scenario: Oh no! The “Return to Now” button on your Acme Universal Time Travel Belt (“Don’t Ask Why; Just Say When!”) is malfunctioning. Your 24-hour pleasure trip to ~fourteenth-century [Insert Destination of Your Choice] is looking like it’s going to be an extended stay. It’s a good thing you spent all that money on medieval-era Rosetta Stone courses, so language barriers aren’t an issue.
Well, time to make lemonade and all that. You’re stuck in the late Middle Ages with nothing but a mind full of modern knowlege, a handful of gold coins (enough to buy, say, a roof over your head, food, and some various raw materials), and, to be fair, a paperclip.
This has been a fruitful premise for stories, but unless you’re an encyclopedia-minded engineer who’s actually tried building things from scratch your whole life, I thing you’re going to find yourself stymied by some lack of knowledge or will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get some relatively simple thing to work. Mark Twain’s Hank Morgan from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was supposed to be a factory foreman and hands-on guy who came from the rightr era. L. Sprague de Camp’s Martin Padway from Lest Datkness Fall always seemed to me improbably well-equipped in the knowledge department (how many of you have made your own soap?). Doc Brown’s incredibly complex ice-maker seems more likely as a tiome-traveler’s creation – all big, oversized, and complicated to perform one simple-appearing task. Yet it seems a LOT more likely than his Time Locomotive.
De Camp’s Padway, nonetheles, seems the most probable successful stranded-in-the-past time traveler. His inventions are modest and believable. He can’t get his gunpowder to work, but he revolutionizes things with distilled liquor, double-entry bookeeping, and paper and a printing press. He makes a successful semaphore-type telegraph, but he can’t really persuade people to use it. If I could do half of what his character does and as successfully, I’d count myself fortunate. I’m not Cabot (from Ralph Milne Farley’s Radio Planet series) – I couldn’t build a working radio from scratch, as his character does.
This is the premise of the *1632 *book series. Due to an accidental encounter with sufficiently advanced alien technology, a small town from 1999 West Virginia gets transported to Thuringia (part of what’s now called Germany) in the year 1632, smack in the middle of one of the worst wars Europe went through. It’s all extremely well researched and plays out very logically, you might enjoy it if you like ‘rebuilding the modern world from scratch’ scenarios.
If it were just me in the fourteenth century, I’d do my level best to get someone to listen to me about germ theory. Convince someone with enough money to give me a small community in which to enforce better hygiene, and really hope it works. Sadly I don’t know enough about fourteenth century politics or trade conditions to make any instant fortunes, but I’d manage to survive somehow.
I would learn to play the lute. Then I would unleash rock ‘n’ roll on the populace 600 years early! I figure that should get me plenty of gold coins in my purse and some willing wenches in my bed.
Late reply to my own thread, oi. This is actually the best I came up with, too. Germ theory is essentially a self-contained technology – if you can explain it, you can implement it, at least to enough degree to make a difference.
I also think I could probably build a better still than the state of the art of the time, but, having never done so, I’m not positive.
I would skip the details-no one would believe you anyway and take the tried and true route. Make a religion. Co-op the local religion to jumpstart it and make clean a central tenet of the sect. Clean everything-people, furnishings, water, food, etc. No improbable explanations needed. Everyone will buy off on a religion.