If you were from the future, doesn’t it make more sense to be Bill Gates? Just get in on the ground floor with a license that IBM doesn’t realize is incredibly valuable, even though the technology is basically mediocre. Use the next couple decades using the power of that license to continually expand the monopoly, then take the money and run, using your billions to change the world.
Possibly he only travelled back from 2001 or so, since he knew the value of the OS & office software monopolies, but missed out on buying Google.
This is exactly what I came here to post. Tesla was a brilliant guy, but so many of his ideas were so completely round the bend from a physics standpoint that anyone calling him a time traveller would need a reality check.
Edison is more the type of guy who knew something could work but didn’t have any special theoretical insight. His gift was relentlessly plugging away at the possible, especially projects that had potential to become ubiquitous. I don’t know any Edison stories that have him sinking a ton of resources into something that unreservedly was not worth it.
So, he’s kind of an unprepared time traveler? He hasn’t participated in those threads about where you’d go and what you’d know? Or maybe he as prepared for a different era entirely.
"I know that light bulbs can exist because I’ve seen the damned things. If only I had ever asked “hey, what are handy things made of?”, but noooooo, I had to be a history major and learn all about the Hanseatic wool trade. "
If we’re assuming someone who doesn’t quite remember the details (and who by that time would be pretty far removed from his memories of the future anyway), he might not have remembered which was which.
The Edison theory makes sense if you look at the Lest Darkness Fall model of time travel - come on, do you really know how to make paper? Ink? The printing press? You’d keep at it and keep at it because you know it can be done because you know somebody did it, but it might take forever to really get something that works.
I was going to fourth, fifth, sixth whatever Leonardo, but then thought what sort of civilization would leave a mind of that calibre marooned out in western spiral arm of the Galaxy of the Milky Way … or alternatively, if he was just an average Joe that nobody on that side thought merited a rescue mission, maybe we should all keep our heads down until we get a few things sorted out.
That’s kind of how I think of it. We’re all too specialized these days. Sure, I know how a light bulb works, vaguely. I know how to manufacture some things (but not light bulbs). It’d be pretty frustrating.
This gave me an interesting mental image of a reasonably well-rounded and educated person from the modern era suddenly finding themselves in Victorian London and trying to explain to some Very Worthy & Reputable Institution Of Science And Learning that (for example) one of the ways they can fight Cholera is to keep the sewerage away from the drinking water, and to boil (or otherwise purify) water before drinking it, and instead having Lord Academic Worthington & Co saying “Yes, yes, this is all very well and good, but I was on the Telegraph to Mr. Babbage earlier and he’s very interested in this “Internet” thing of which you speak. Adding machines linked by an interconnected series of tubes, by which the learned gentleman might view boudoir photographs of ladies- purely for their artistic and philosophical merits, of course- and amusingly captioned images of the common housecat? I think that’s probably something we should be working on as a start. Then we can move on to some of the other items on your list- simple cures for terrible diseases, practical applications of “Electricity”, this “aeroplane” contraption, and so forth.”
To which our intrepid Time Traveller thinks “Bollocks, I’ve got no idea how the internet actually works in a nuts-and-bolts sense. Why did they have to pick the hardest thing first?”
Well, Jules Verne seems like the first obvious choice.
Um… George Lucas! He ripped off a very successful mid-nineties trilogy, but a few years later he tried to make another one by his own devices and you can see the result.
Hundreds of years later he winds up with a wikipedia entry that reads: "Albert Taylor-Smythe, eccentric Victorian, best known for his attempts to send pornography via morse code. "
My suggestion about Lovecraft wasn’t altogether serious, but if it were it would definitely not be based upon the writer’s notions about race. Just for the record.
Whoever made the Antikythera device. It’s not the function of the thing, which is remarkable enough - it’s the style of design. It looks like the work of a person flung back in time from the Victorian era.
That’s an excellent one. Kinda makes you wonder if there isn’t a steam-powered Giant Robot buried under aeons of silt at the bottom of the Aegean, doesn’t it?
