I thought about Franklin as well. He contributed to many fields - electricity, eyeglasses, Franklin stoves, politics - and many of the things are very ‘Connecticut Yankee’ - I’m cold, I’m gonna make a better stove, I can’t see, I’m gonna make better eyeglasses. Plus he seemed to enjoy the ladies and lived a long time, as you might see in someone from the future with an enhanced immune system or vaccinations - just the thing to ward off pneumonia - or syphilis.
I wonder about him risking his life with the kite though. Seems that he ought to have known better.
To survive the situations he was in, my theory is that if his original strategy didn’t work, he would travel back in time and try something else etc. until he was successful.
Anyone who wins 100% of the time over a long period of time is suspect of being able to travel back in time, imho.
If Johnny Chan won 3 WSOP’s in a row (he lost the 3rd to Phil Helmuth) I would suspect him.
I am pretty impressed with the ages of the Founding Fathers as well. Benjamin Franklin also popped into my mind when I read the thread title. He is the oldest and the biggest polymath of the bunch so I think he was probably the leader of that group of time travelers. He probably coached DJ Tommy Jeff and MC Georgie Wah! to round out the crew because he couldn’t be everywhere at once even with a time machine. Ben was a player on lots of different levels and used his knowledge he gained growing up starting in 2067 in what is now Trenton, New Jersey to go back and change some things he learned from the British/French empire scene there. It all got started based on a bar bet on how easy Colonial chicks would have been if you had influence and mad skills.
I am not a historian and certainly not a Sumerologist, but the brief descriptions I’ve read of Urukagina, what with his political and social reforms, lead me to believe that he was somewhat ahead of his time in terms of political thought. Wikipedia has a short article.
Steve Jobs. The problem being that I’ve met people who knew him as a child. They were his teachers. He was quite bright, and a full fledged jerk even as a child. Teachers don’t like to call their little students assholes for some reason.
Oh, and I like Leonardo, Archimedes, the Founding Fabs (esp Franklin) too.
They’ve been writing documentaries rather than science fiction. How better to direct the path into the future than to put the ideas into the young minds of the people who will be creating the technology to get there?
Nikola Tesla seems more likely than Edison, given Edison’s habit of trying several hundred failed ways of doing something before getting it right.
“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.”
Update: Curse you Mariemarie! You sniped me while I was finding the quote!
My theory is that Edison was a time traveler from the future, but he wasn’t a scientist or an inventor in his own time. Maybe he ran a semi-successful hot dog cart operation. Something happens and he’s blipped back in time. He knows that things like light bulbs exist, but he doesn’t have any clue how they work. So he talks someone into funding his operations and has a small army of people just keep trying things until something works.
“Look - all I know is it’s kind of shaped like this, and you can get them four for a dollar at the A&P. Go figure it out!”
