I assume you mean one of those old roller machines that don’t require electricity. My grandmother used one of those.
I was going to ask where the washer gets plugged in to and what the hoses will be connected to.
BTW, those roller machines are called either wringers or wrangles depending where you live. My mom used to use one when I was very young, but it was powered and I don’t recall it having a hand crank. But they only do part of the job of washing clothes, although it’s one that takes a good deal of muscle if you’re washing by hand.
I think they were called wringers where my grandmother was, small-town northwestern Arkansas. Even though they were inside the town limits, they were on the edge and had a big pasture they used to rent out to people to keep their horses. Just inside the pasture was my grandmother’s wash house, a small building where that washer was kept. Good memories.
When I was a kid, it was my job to wind the handle of the mangle http://www.1900s.org.uk/life-times-images/woman-mangling.jpg
The screw at the top was to vary the pressure (I suspect that when I was winding, it was lowered somewhat), and the top roller was spring loaded. All it did was to squeeze the water out before the washing was hung on the line.
I did say “or” in my first post.
I also have a Daishō, but I figured an Oakshotte XV would possibly sell better than a katana (except for the exoticism angle, I suppose)
Probably a spring-wound clock. It would perform a recognized useful function, as a stand-alone item, without requiring any unavailable external power source. It could be immediately put to use to revolutionize marine navigation and accurate mapmaking.
Hello all, I have read all your posts and must say this is one cool discussion.
My observations as an “Old World” poster.
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Things have been around for a long time. To think that “in the days of old they didn’t wash” is perhaps due to someone’s cowboy culture… the Italian city of SAVONA gets its name from the French… no, from the GAUL word used to name soap, namely, SAVON. This means that in the days of ancient Rome, soap was a common commodity. The same applies to looms to weave frabrics, natural dyes to color them, etc… nails… carpenter’s files…
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Whateverr you want to take 800 years back into the past must be understandable and comprehensible by the observer; his/her comment should be “wow, that’s cool!”, not “AAAgh! Witchcraft!” Hence, whatever you take back into history should be easily explained, usable and, most of all, practical.
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Whatever you take back 800 years in time must be replicable. In other words… a shopkeeper will use a knife, if he cannot manufacture one, he will turn to the blacksmith and HE manufactures one. Now… imagine showing up with a calculator: can you explain how it works? Beyond just punching buttons ? Can you assemble one ? I think not. The result is a charge for witchcraft… BURN!
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Whatever you take back must be for the public good, not for the immediate advantage of one local bully against his neighbor (or even of the King…) So a book on herbs and remedies, or on civil engineering, would be much more credible than the common household atlas, which is next to useless to a seagoing captain… and the wrong scale to a professional soldier or merchant…
My opinion ? The best “one” thing does not exist, but an *array of bright ideas *would be THE breadwinner. In ancient days there was no such thing as the hand-cranked drill (it was powered by a bow and string) no such thing as a drill bit and no such thing as spiral points! Hence, no screws and screwdrivers… Go with civil engineering… or Anatomy and Pathology… A Herborist’s Almanac with recipes for all possible cures, including antibiotics and alcoholic solutions (iodine).
Ah… that… pill for your liver pains… what’s the name? Oh, yes, Viagra! 
Would be pretty easy to assassinate some king or another with a high powered rifle and 10 rounds.
The OP specifies “medieval people recognise as something immediately worth a fortune”. I would think that a gun, a lighter or a flashlight would do the trick. Yes, all of their utility will be short lived but they will be seen immediately as the power of life and death, or fire, or light. It doesn’t get much more godlike than that.
IIRC, it took the invention of the reverberating furnace to make crucible steel of high enough quality to make springs that wouldn’t fatigue or have unreliable tension.
My (fake) pearl necklaces. And my kids collection of colorfull facetted glass beads. Each is pretty enough to sew on a nobles robes.
a cow/ox (rarely to be eaten for plowing)
candles—super expensive, used animal fat tallow or wax.
a side of beef (standard meal for plebs: some sort of plant-flavored porridge. beef was very expensive. game poachers were often hanged)
battle sword, anything needing metallurgy.
a cooking pot (for ordinary people, you’d have multiple families sharing one pot and eating communally.
firewood (ordinary people burned twigs—what we’d call firewood was reserved for the elite.)
If you allow your time traveler to do a shopping run before transportation, I think the ‘best return on investment’ would have to be a bucket of unset cubic zirconia.
It certainly is true that lots of things were invented or available as super-expensive prototypes for a lot longer than most people expect. These products only become game-changing technology when manufacturing or materials science improves enough that these things can be made reliable and cheap.
The perfect example is the breech-loading firearm. For hundreds of years people could see that a breech-loader would be much easier to use than a muzzle-loader. The problem is that nobody could make a breech-loader that worked well, because the metallurgy and machining didn’t exist to make a tight enough seal to prevent the propellant gasses from escaping out the breech. So it wasn’t like someone came up with the brilliant idea of a breech-loader one day and the next day muzzle-loaders are obsolete. Instead someone came up with a breech-loader and built one, but it sucked, and people stuck with technology that actually worked.
The iPod is another example. There had been PDAs and handheld devices and tablets for decades. But no one wanted one, because all of them sucked. The iPod wasn’t revolutionary because of the idea, it was revolutionary because it was durable enough, cheap enough, was embedded in a working marketplace, and was easy to use.
Or the story of longitude, solved by the marine chronometer. Everyone could see that an accurate clock that could be carried on a ship would solve the problem of longitude, but nobody could actually make one that worked good enough. Even if you had a copy of the plans for the devices that won the longitude prize it would be almost impossible to duplicate them without the actually existing workshops and tools and materials that the inventors actually had.
Some things, like stirrups, are easy to make and easy to duplicate once you get the idea. Others, like a marine chronometer don’t rely on an idea, but an exacting manufacturing process and supply chain. Even a simple idea like barbed wire is useless without an endless supply of cheap steel wire that only became available in the 1800s.
It would be easy for a jeweler to tell that they weren’t real diamonds due to their hardness but I wonder if they would care.
Anyway, I forgot to include the point of all that. The point is, an item that is purportedly valuable because it can be understood and reverse-engineered by the people of the day is naive. It’s entirely possible that an item can be easily understood but impossible to duplicate using local technology simply because the tools, techniques, and raw materials don’t exist or are so expensive that the item is nothing more than a curiosity.
Yes, a jeweler could tell that they weren’t diamonds. You don’t pass off the CZs as diamonds, you sell them as Narsites. The only reason CZs are considered “fake” gemstones is because they can be synthesized cheaply and don’t occur in nature. They are real sparkly crystals that, in medieval times, are extremely rare, since you will be the only source of them.
In medieval times amethysts were extremely valuable stones, on par with rubies, sapphires, emeralds and diamonds. When vast deposits of amethyst were discovered in Brazil the value of amethysts plummeted. Might be better to take back amethysts rather than an unknown mineral like CZ. Although in lots of ways CZs are better gemstones than diamonds.
You can then become the great-grandpa of Captain Nemo.
But the reason I post here is because a thought occurred to me. Would the nukes will be relatively useless as there are no satellites to guide the missiles? Or are there other ways to still make them accurate enough to, lets say, hit the HQ of Genghis Kahn?*
- Yeah, the OP mentioned a year later than Genghis, but I have seen historians put 476 as the start of the middle ages.
I still think salt or sugar is the best bet, although bringing some clothes might work as well.
Sugar, although a luxury item, was available in quantity in this period. Tomasso Loredano, a Venetian merchant, is recorded as having shipped 100,000 pounds of sugar to London in 1319. I can’t imagine that a household quantity of sugar would be strikingly valuable.
Salt, of course, can be obtained wherever there is proximity to salt water and can also be mined. There were a number of salt-working towns in England. The suffix -wich often (but not always) indicates that the town had brine springs or wells.
In short, sugar and salt were somewhat valuable but available without undue difficulty in the early 14th century. You would do better with other spices, and better still with metal and glass objects, such as timepieces, binoculars, and mirrors, that were not available in the same form in medieval times.