And then when they ask you what it does, you can proudly exclaim, “What does it do!? Nothing! That’s the beauty of it!”
ETA: If you do this, make sure to get your name recorded for posterity, please. Annoying when attributions go unattributed.
How about discovering the Americas, or Australia?
For me to be any use, you’d have to send me back far enough to invent the pointy stick. As some posters have noted, it can be trickier than it seems to be much use. Ancient Greeks understood steam power, but if I got artisans to build a simple engine to do something, the folks in charge would probably say 1) you owe the artisans a pile of drachmas, got any plan to pay them or should we just get your slave outfit ready now? and 2) who the hell needs a steam engine when you can just order a slave to do it? I guess I could go to Thermopylae and yell, “Leonidas! Behind you!”
Permit me to recommend a listen to the song Good Advice by Allan Sherman, in which he travels to various eras and prompts some notable people to make some valuable contributions to society – with but one blunder, and that was a horrific one!
(You can find it easily on YouTube. Here is one link which, I think, includes some cute animations.)
I doubt any such time travel would help anyone, as if they didn’t have some bug or virus that killed you, you’d probably have one or several that killed them. Or both.
Hey, maybe the dinosaurs had time travel.
I know enough about binary logic, binary arithmetic and computer architecture that I could probably make a basic ALU with access to just wires, a power source, and an inverter (probably a NAND gate). I can’t make the power source logic gates myself, but since I now have a lot of free time and no internet to piss my time away on, I’m fairly confident that I could probably reinvent it enough to work correctly given some trial and error. That’s assuming I’m in a fairly developed nation at least as far advanced as the Enlightenment, and I can get some money for materials.
I’m extremely confident that I could probably reinvent the bulk of the important bits of modern theory of computation and complexity theory. Nothing too advanced, but I could reinvent everything up to Turing Equivalence, the notion and undecidability of the Entscheidungsproblem, and most of the non-obscure complexity classes. This is with correct proofs. I could also probably make a decent stab at lambda calculus and semantics, but I’m less well versed in those.
My actual field is AI, but I don’t think I could do much there. I could probably catapault statistics and calc ahead 50 years or so assuming I could communicate with the great minds of the time (again, assuming I’m at least in the Enlightenment). I don’t know the foundations of calc and such well enough to invent it in a solopsistic universe, but with other people to bounce ideas off of, I could probably make some real progress. I could probably also point physics in the right direction if I’m before 1850.
These are all eschewing practical concerns like “somehow becoming a nobleman” or “learning French/Latin well enough”.
If you back far enough time in the USA you could “invent” quite a few things that would change the course of history quite quickly. And, depending on the tribe you land near, being a woman wouldn’t be a disadvantage.
Things I could do ala Ayla: make a fishing pole, I know saltpeter can be found in bat guano but beyond that would have no clue as how to make gunpowder, how to make an icehouse (dig deep/pack in sawdust/add river ice), and I might be able to describe how to make a cross-bow to a bow maker. But most of my other skills wouldn’t translate very well such as knowing how to sew cloth doesn’t do much good when you are working with leather.
Of course the last NA time traveler only managed to disappear that one colony. I think a bear attacked him before anything could be done about the Pilgrims. He did leave a message saying how he was sorry that he missed Columbus’ timeline but, you know, time travel isn’t an exact thing.
Well, as the Outlander series shows clearly, even knowing what happens if you don’t disinfect a wound and saying it out loud could lead you straight to the stake.
My best bet would be to become either a cloistered nun of a healing/nursing order, or a “Maria” and be Governess (eventually wife?) to a wealthy man. This man must employ other staff to provide clothing. I can cook, read, teach, nurse, clean, but my inability to sew and knit more than minimally would raise a lot of eyebrows.
Or what eclectic wench said, live my life as male. But then a lot of my nursing skills would not be put to use. I could teach, I guess, or apprentice myself to a doctor. Although it would be horrific if I had to do things like trepanation.
My Google-fu is weak today.
Back in my youth (pre-1990, I suppose) I read short story of a time travelling scientist who got stuck in the past, invented penicillin, and changed the entire history of technology and the world – and not for the positive. So obviously modern time travelling scientists discovered this fact, and sent back someone to kill him before it happened.
Yeah, slight highjack, but this thread reminds me of that short story. Anyone have any idea of its title and/or author?