1915 is a terrible year to which to travel for most men. Not only do you have the possibility of being drafted for the Great War but you have the Flu Pandemic which followed.
You won’t have to worry about that unless you are in Europe. In the US it will be years before you need to worry about it, and personally if it’s a two way trip I won’t be hanging out in 1915 for more than a year or so setting stuff up (I’d get every inoculation available, though I’m pretty sure the flu shot wouldn’t do much for the 1919 epidemic so need to be gone long before that. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about most of the diseases that were about then…and I’m thinking I’d isolate myself for a month or two before going to make sure I don’t bring anything nasty back with me either), then I’ll jump to 1927 to ensure I reset my investments (and buy some more cool cars and such) in preparation for 1929.
The solution, as has been stated above, is a few hundred dollars of pre-1915 paper money and a sports almanac. Funds get low, go to the track.
Except there’s still cholera, yellow fever, typhus and plague and other good stuff to consider. A pocketful of penicillin and other antibiotics would be helpful but not a cure-all.
Oddly, I was thinking about the conundrum in the OP just yesterday, when I was contemplating traveling back in time to just before the Dutch tulipomania, with a box of the best of today’s tulip bulbs to propagate and sell for fantastic prices. i would need a bunch of florins or whatever spending money they had then to buy necessities, and those might be hard to find now in quantity. So should I counterfeit my own in gold or silver and risk a sharp-eyed trader spotting them? Problems, problems…
What type of information is still available about individual horse races and maybe other sports events from the year 1915 to gamble on?
(Or maybe you just jump back and forth with your time machine a couple of hours (in 1915), to buy a newspaper with the results.)
As a side line for income, go to a casino, play blackjack, and count cards. They were not countering for that until the 2nd half of the 20th century. Bring a 1911 in 45 ACP, though - most (all) casinos were illegal, and so possibly less than sanguine about losing repeatedly to some funny talking dude.
In 1915, the process of culturing pearls was only just beginning, so pearls would have been vastly more expensive back then. Hit up Kay Jewelers before your trip for all the pearl jewelry you can carry, and you’ll be able to live in luxury.
The entire thread is about fraud. We’re just trying to find the easiest and most effective ones to commit.
Yes and Cubic Zironium, sell it as a diamond.
Use small stones, say 1/2 carat CZ, 1 ct emeralds and rubies.
and as Tom sez, pearls.
Just checked ebay, you can buy 1914 $10 bills from about $50 each.
How difficult is it to make penicillin?
“Invent” several easy to manufacture drugs.
What could you sell to help with the “Spanish flu”?
Not necessarily. Bringing aluminum wouldn’t be fraud; its a rare product in that time and would be of use to whoever buys it.
Gold/silver/gems might be fraud in a very vague sense I admit, in that their value is more strongly based on pure rarity, and you’re upsetting that rarity by bringing some of those goods back in time, which would tend to depress the value of the commodity.
Above all, stay away from all them loose wimmin, or an ancestor will steal all your loot!
Are you trying to obey the Temporal Prime Directive, or just get rich by any easy means available?
I was thinking about a similar situation (sorry for the hijack), but I would want to go back in time to when salt was super valuable and trade it for gold. But I’m not sure what the ideal time frame would be (when is the value of salt in comparison to gold at its highest?).
Penicillin would do little good against the Spanish flu which was caused by a virus. If there were opportunistic bacterial pneumonia infections, it would help, but I don’t know if this occurred.
So, assuming you could buy a lot of those you’d have $232.48 in value (in 1915) for $50.00 spent according to this. That would certainly be the way to go if you could get your hands on at least a few thousand dollars worth of $10 bills from that time period. That should be enough as an initial stake to build up.
No it isn’t. There are a zillion things we have that anyone now over 10 will deeply miss if they’re living in 1915. From technology to forms of transportation, to medical advances. I defy the majority of us to go without TV, cellphones, microwave ovens, computers, jet airplanes and interstate highways for the rest of our lives. Then have millions of dollars and not be able to buy any of those things. And when you talk about them you’ll be looked at not as a visionary but a nut! What do you expect to buy with all this money when all of the good stuff doesn’t exist?
If the goal is to go back in time to make some money and come back, one could just go back to yesterday and hit some lotteries.
I can tell the difference between CZ and diamonds just by looking. I’m sure a trained jeweler could as well.
But pearls would be a goldmine back then.
Following the OP very strictly, I would use the time machine to travel back a ways and buy Action #1 and a few baseball cards. Then zip back to yesterday and auction them off. That way I would be very rich and technically living in the past.