You're a time traveler to the late 1800s. What do you do for money?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I don’t usually do hypotheticals, but I’ve been watching a fair amount of TV westerns lately and I thought it might be an interesting topic. Sometimes when I hear the price of something on a period show I check it against an online inflation calculator to see if they were actually in the ballpark.

So the cost of things like basic commodities, horses, cattle, land, etc. seems to be much less than they would cost today, but I understand basic concepts like inflation indexes and cost of living. I know that in modern times our buying power and standard of living is in many ways much better than in past days for commodities like food and clothing. Other things are much more expensive compared to earning power in the olden days. For example, I doubt many doctors take chickens in payment anymore. But then, you get what you pay for.

The online inflation calculator I found only goes back to 1913, and says $1 then = $26 today. So for late 1800s let’s say $1 = $30 just for a round number. What form of currency or valuable could a time traveler to the late 1800s take with them to exploit that differential, and not only be able to support oneself but be well off?

Gold, I believe, has significantly outstripped inflation in value over the years, so that’s probably not a good choice. Other precious minerals like silver are probably similar.

The best idea I could think of off the top of my head would be to obtain a vintage bill or banknote and counterfeit it until you could make it rain, old-time style. I doubt anti-counterfeit measures and detection were very sophisticated back then. Or do the same with vintage stock share certificates, but those would have separate records somewhere that could be cross-checked, I imagine.

Then, of course, once you have your stake you could take advantage of your knowledge of the future to get even richer, like invest in Comstock Lode mines before they hit it big.

2

I’d take back knowledge of something simple that would have a known benefit over what was then available and just a little legitimate cash to get you started. Like a simple recipe for modern day soap and hygiene products. Maybe invent blue jeans. Something more legal than counterfeiting money because just showing up with a load of cash could get you robbed or murdered because you didn’t really understand the social structure and warning signs.

3

Obvious…open a blacksmith shop, so you could obfuscate the experiments you are doing in an attempt to get back to the future.

4

Yes, good idea, but it would take time and more than a little legit cash to get a biz like “solost Soap Co.” or blue jean company off the ground. And I’d want to live in relative comfort till then.

I think if you took reasonable precautions, kept quiet and stayed under the radar spending the money sensibly you’d be OK. The idiot Cartwright sons on Bonanza were always getting robbed (and sometimes framed for murder) because they’d talk out loud in the public square or the saloon about the five grand in cash they were carrying from a cattle sale, and they’d get overheard.

5

Just write a lot of bad checks.

6

Manufactured gemstones of all kinds. Easily concealed on one’s person, and even if the jeweler gives you a fraction of the worth - you’re well on the way to stockpiling wealth.

Can you travel back and forth? Harry Turtledove’s juvenile novels deal with this topic. Bring things to sell that are in advance of the current technology - but not TOO far advanced, because that would arouse suspicion.

7

How many physics, engineering, and medical textbooks can I carry? I’m sure that Harvard and MIT would fight over them. I might even swing by Yale on my way to Boston just so I can get a baseline price.

This is probably a better idea but I want to screw with the timeline. What’s the point of going back in time if I can’t kill baby Hitler too?

8

Just bring gold. Easily confirmed value. Accepted everywhere.

9

I considered that, but weren’t gemstones really not that valuable until the early 1900s, when companies like DeBeers began to artificially inflate the value of diamonds? I suppose if you manufacture synthetic diamonds at a very low cost in the present it wouldn’t matter than much. But if you’re selling a lot of gems just to make a liveable amount of cash, that might arouse suspicion.

I see a lot of answers relate to exploiting knowledge of the future, which I acknowledged, but this is about starting out with enough to be well off. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that I’m a historian, and I don’t want to, or am not allowed to screw with the timeline too much. So beating Levi Strauss to the punch and inventing solost Blue Jeans is out of the question. And introducing anachronistic future tech is a definite no-no. I want to stay under the radar as much as possible, but live comfortably.

In my OP I said I considered gold, but I think gold has far outstripped inflation over the years. So its spending power in the past might not be that great compared to its current value. I could be wrong about that, but also it’s heavy and draws attention.

10

If you can hop back before the 1880’s or so, you could sell aluminum for a good price. I think it was about $30/oz before they figured out how to extract it in large quantities. That would have been about a month’s wages at the time.

11

Which is why I mentioned making soap. You would just be another soap maker, but a better one. You could market high end clientele in the eastern cities and leave the great unwashed . . . unwashed. It would not take much seed money to get started, just enough to rent a space and buy some kettles and supplies for a couple of batches then scale up as the profits came in. How much affect in the timeline would you have by making people smell better?

12

Good answer. Relating to my amended condition of not screwing with the timeline too much, introducing large amounts of aluminum might not be good in that regard, plus you’d need a cover story as to how you produced all the pure aluminum, but if you didn’t go too crazy and were careful, this could work.

13

Yeah, no, I agree this is a good idea in the longer term, but I’m wondering what do I take with me as a time-traveling historian to spend, sell or trade to live comfortably and off the radar from pretty much day one.

14

Check out the short story The Third Level…
(Jack Finney? Most of the clever time travel stories of the early '50s were his).

Haven’t read it in decades, but basically:

Guy gets lost, wanders down some stairs in Grand Central Station, and comes out on a level of steam locomotives. The bank notes, the technology, the fashions are all late-1800s.

He stumbles back upstairs, and spends the next few months trying to find his way back down there. Oh, and tells his friend Sam about it.

Well, Sam disappears, but one day the protagonist discovers an old First Day Issue envelope in his grandfather’s old stamp collection. Inside is a letter from Sam, who’s living happily in 1894 and says keep trying!

He checks the local stamp and coin store, and Sam had been there, bought a thousand dollars in old bank notes… “enough to open a nice little feed and grain store”.

(Me? I’d buy an old-time General Store. With a big porch with a barrel of peanuts and a couple of codgers playing checkers. Oh, and I’d take plenty of bills back with me, so my store wouldn’t have to turn a profit.)

TL/DR: Buy antique currency before you go!

ETA: Found it! PDF, only 3 pages, worth it. Especially the last line …

15

I thought of this, but I would assume that vintage bank notes that are reasonably well preserved are collector’s items and not cheap. So, if $1 purchasing power in the 1880s = $30 today, and a vintage $1 bank note today costs, say $100, the math don’t work (may have been different in the early 50s when the story was written). Plus, how many paper bank notes could have survived?

That’s why I proposed in my OP, maybe obtain one vintage bank note and counterfeit it.

16

Sticking with artificial gemstones that are actually available now at current prices, diamonds are still very expensive, but sapphires are dirt cheap.

https://www.gemsngems.com/product-category/lab-created/lab-created-corundum/lab-created-white-sapphire-12/round-lab-created-white-sapphire-12/page/4/

Of course CZ is even cheaper–they practically pay you to take them–but it isn’t a copy of something with a market back then.

https://www.gemsngems.com/product-category/cubic-zirconia-white/cubic-zirconia-white-a/page/3/

17

A good color printer and the right paper would be all you would need to print up all the money you would ever want or need. The thing is, what do you do with it? There wasn’t much to buy back then; no cars, TVs, phones, etc. Medicine as we now know it didn’t even exist. My God, how boring!

18

1890 $100.00 Treasury Banknote
$129 on eBay.

So I can get my thousand vintage bucks for $1290. No counterfeiting needed.

And as for what to buy, all I’d need is a Victorian house with a veranda, some musical instruments to play on it, and an icebox full of that new Coca-Cola stuff.

C’mon! Let’s go!

(I just have to eat one last can of Pringles before I say goodbye…)

19

OK, maybe, then? $1000 in notes x 30 (accounting for inflation) = $30,000 in today’s spending power for only $1290. Pretty good seed cash, if you can get ahold of 1000 individual vintage bills.

I see on your eBay link they also sell sets of bank note reproductions for cheap, so that might be an even better way to go. Don’t even have to bother counterfeiting them yourself, just run them through the dryer a couple times with a few tennis balls.

20

Hookers but no Blow? I’m not going!

But of course I could invent powdered cocaine.