A standard smartphone from 2012 somehow ends up in the hands of researchers in the mid 1920s. By standard, I mean a touch screen phone with a built in camera, some kind of keyboard, with some some mp3s, and games loaded onto it, but obviously, the wifi and phone service would be unavailable.
My GQish question is whether they’d be able to use it to make advances in the technology they had at the time, or if they wouldn’t be able to make sense of the way it worked, yet? If not, how long would it take before they could get a lot out of it? I wonder what would happen with 2012 technology as a result?
You could maybe eliminate some research dead ends, but unless you had some reasonable knowledge about what a semiconductor was and were able to explain the technology, it might not be all that helpful. There’s a lot of technological advances needed to produce today’s semiconductors and displays that still have to take place, and that are market driven, so it’s not clear how much you’d be able to bootstrap.
Also, we did a thread very similar to this a few months ago. I’ll see if I can find it.
Transistors hadn’t been invented yet, and I’m not sure if the physics of the day would say that something like that could even work. Actually, I’m not sure if the microscopes of the day would allow them to even see the inner workings of the chip.
The miniaturization of the antenna alone would keep them busy for a decade. They may not understand it a first but they would have a hell of a lot of fun with it. Give an engineer a problem to solve and they are in heaven.
We once did a similar thread about UFO’s. The idea was to ask what if a UFO with super technology crashed landed on earth today (in area 51, of course ). How could we use it to improve our current technology? Would we be able to figure out how it works, etc,etc.
Somebody proposed an interesting analogy–supppose you could take a modern technology back to 1900. An airplane. Specifically, the B-1 stealth bomber.Would anybody be able to figure out what it was?
Imagine Albert Einstein himself looking at it wonder. Einstein was alive and at the height of his creative thinking in those years. But it was an era when nobody had yet proven that flying was at all possible .
Imagine Einstein looking at a mssively heavy, wedge-shaped device made of strange materials, mounted on very weak, spindly legs with small wheels. Would he even identify it as a flying machine?
And if so, would it have helped the Wright Brothers improve their lightweight device made mostly of cloth.?
Engineers love techie stuff…but they are limited by the world as we know it with current levels of science. Science fiction is fun, but not realistic.
Our technology is the result of many decades of research and slow, steady improvement in technology. Except for very basic technology, it is almost never a case of “oh so that’s what it is, we can make that!”
As was pointed out in one of the threads about a later time, but applies even moreso to the 20’s, they wouldn’t even be able to SEE the circuitry using their best technology and science. They certainly have zero base knowledge of the materials processing and manufacturing techniques necessary to make any of the shit even if they were to make giant sized versions of everything.
Transisters haven’t been invented yet. They don’t have the working experience with them. Now you’re telling them that there are millions of them too small for them to see on that chip. How does that help them.
It’s made with a lot of exotic materials they have no working experience with or ability to manufacture.
They have no working experience with a lot of the base technology of the phone and they aren’t going to get it in a couple of years of experimentation. All of that took decades of slow and steady improvement to reach the point of that phone in your hand.
Software wise, they don’t really have computers yet, so they have no built up experience and no tools to even begin to understand that shit.
Unless you knew what to look for, it wouldn’t even help much if you had a good microscope. Most of what you’d see is the metal interconnect, blocking everything else underneath. You’d have to know to etch away each layer very carefully to see the layer below. If you could cross-section it, that would help. But an electron microscope is what you really need, and that wouldn’t have been available in the 1920s.
Much better would have been a 1960 transistor radio with discrete transistors. First place, they had radio signals and would have been able to see immediately that it was a radio receiver. (And, yes, to answer another thread, they had batteries and could replace them.) And I don’t think it would have been that hard to figure out what the transistors did. I recently read one of those past predictions, this one from around then. And one of the predictions made that particularly concerned them was what they called a “cold cathode vacuum tube”. That hasn’t happened, AFAIK, but the transistor solves the same problem–with no vacuum and no cathode. They would still have had to figure out the manufacturing process, but they would have.
I think the fundamental physics would have been understood by the end of the '30s, but not the '20s. And I agree that discrete transistors would have been infinitely easier to figure out than ICs.
I could see a cell phone (not with today’s transmission schemes, which require sophisticated decoding and encoding, but more like a fancy walkie-talkie) based on vacuum tubes, since after all they aren’t really THAT different from a radio, but not a smart phone. It is entirely possibly to make tubes small enough (no reason why they couldn’t be made even smaller, say the size of a mini Christmas light and a fraction of a watt of heater power) so you could use a dozen or two in a hand-held battery-powered device. Anything more though and you are really asking too much for 1920s technology, even if you used equivalents (e.g. CRTs have been made small enough to be used as cell phone displays, if still bulkier and probably not that small until much later, but the basic technology was already around, but how do you replicate a multimillion transistor chip with vacuum tubes or primitive transistors, which precludes the use of any display in a realistic 1920s phone)
You could play Angry Birds or play your MP3 files. Of course, when they heard your MP3 files, their reaction might be, what is that horrid noise that thing is making? Is it malfunctioning?
You could also take pictures or movies and play them back. (What? No film? No developing? How did you fit all those pictures in that little box?)
You couldn’t even make video then without photoelectric cells and whirling discs with little holes in them. (You could barelycall itvideo.) So that part of the tech would have 1920s minds totally buffaloed.
Without a charger the phone wouldn’t last for long, maybe just a day or two. What would it remind a 1920s person of? Maybe a clock or picture frame? Without it being powered on I don’t see how they would even recognize it as a phone.
A 1920s engineer or scientist would know wires and basic electrical theory, and would have no idea what a computer or LCD is. There were so many advances that led to the modern smartphone like plastics, LCDs, integrated circuits, camera technology, and the miniaturization of it all. They might determine the battery is a battery by detecting its output, but them being able to correctly charge it would be unlikely.
OK, so, related question: How far back could you take a smartphone of today for the researchers of that era to find it useful/be able to reverse engineer it/whatever. 1960s? 1970s? 50s maybe? What are we talking, here?
And I doubt they’d have the capability to get to the interconnect layers and the part with the actual transistors, especially if they didn’t know what they are looking for. We do this now for debugging, and it is a time consuming and difficult operation, even with the right equipment. Then they’d have to be able to understand the doping of the very small P and N areas. And then they’d have to understand that what was being implemented was logic functions. The idea of using electronics to implement Boolean Algebra was first proposed by Claude Shannon in 1939 in his Master’s Thesis.
I think the battery might be more useful, since it is mostly chemistry and not hard to analyze. They might be able to understand the screen technology also.
John Campbell had an editorial in the early 1960s called “No Copying” about this subject, looking at what older people would do with a modern at the time jet. Not much, and it was easier back then.
). How could we use it to improve our current technology? Would we be able to figure out how it works, etc,etc.