Quiz three.

[churchmouse]

I don't think you broke the game. But you and a few others mentioned how they'd get rich having today's knowledge after being transported back to 1804. That assumes that each person is the "only" one transported. If everybody got transported, then everybody would have today's knowledge and I guess whomever made it to the patent office first would win.

This quiz is not about financial gains but surviving the journey. Any gains would be secondary. If my property showed up I would be (as Rhino stated) burned at the stake.....After I ran through my fuel and ammo reserves.

 

[JeepHammer]

I don't think you broke the game. But you and a few others mentioned how they'd get rich having today's knowledge after being transported back to 1804. That assumes that each person is the "only" one transported. If everybody got transported, then everybody would have today's knowledge and I guess whomever made it to the patent office first would win.

No mention of anyone else, but let's play...

A knowledge OF something you used or saw,
And being able to reproduce said item are two different things.

Most people will know how to push buttons on a microwave, but how many could build one, or the generators/transformers/control systems to power it?

You *HAVE* a computer/smart phone, etc.
Can you reproduce it with 1804 materials?
Can YOU, PERSONALLY make the materials needed for anything you might have knowledge about, or took back with you?

While you *CAN* patent an idea,
It does you zero good if no one can produce that idea.
Patenting a jumbo jet in 1804 wouldn't do a bit of good until a process for extracting aluminum were operational, the materials for jet engines were developed, electronic/hydraulic flight controls were invented, even tires would be 200 years away...

Can *YOU* make ordnance steel for modern 'Gun' barrels?
Can *YOU* make nitroglycerin from nitric acid & glycerin for 'Smokeless' propellants?

Do *YOU* know how to draw copper wire out, what size to make it, how many windings you need, how to electrically insulate that wire, how to wind armatures & stators, etc.
How about mechanical voltage, amperage & current limiters, switching & fusing...
Solid state would be a few years off at best, so it would start with mechanical everything.

Even the current electrical engineers would be screwed without solid state and synthetics if they didn't study how things were done circa 1900-1960.
They would know exactly what to do with a PLC controller, but they couldn't build one, or probably the equivalent mechanical switching to replace it.

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It's linear, scientific thinking...

I'm wondering when the joker from the other threads is going to ask if I cut & paste from somewhere else, on a question that just cropped up and has very specific guidelines... Which a cut & paste blurb wouldn't reference...
You don't have to be too bright to own a smart phone!

When you all 'Discuss' (force) religion or whatever, I take an entirely different tract because I think linear & scientifically.
I understand gears & wires, I don't understand 'Fuzzy', random thinking or people & what they do.
Circular argument with no logic doesn't get past me, so I don't get confused by 'Catch Phrases' & 'Sound Bites', I never 'Assume' anything.

It's like the argument on cartridge brass annealing,
Metallurgy is a very understood, precise science,
The correct scientific based information is easily available,
The parameters, rules & factors are clearly defined & published,
And you can directly gauge & see results with a couple of pieces of calibrated scientific equipment...

And yet, endless passing on of myths, silly ideas, outright false garbage, even after the sources/procedures have been published.
Sticking with the lie because learning something new, updating the education is just too 'Hard' for them...

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One point I would make,
While many jumped to weapons,
In 1804...
Clean water, was a HUGE issue. Water was often mixed with alcohol to make 'Grog', simply to kill off most pathogens.
No sewers, waste dumped directly on the ground, or into shallow pits... Right along side shallow water wells...

New York City STILL gets it's water from between 92 & 125 miles of hand dug tunnels just to stop plagues.

Sewage control MUCH sooner (from a little scientific study in pathogens) would have went a LONG way towards stopping those plagues.
Some chemical science & engineering would have went a long way towards clean water being supplied.

Tractors & farming equipment would feed & cloth millions without slaves.
Preservation of crops would allow that food to get to the people that needed it.
Effective, reasonably high speed transportation would get supplies where they needed to go in a reasonable time frame, and at greatly reduced costs.
Make money on volume instead of individual.

Skip the 'Steam Era' entirely.
If electrical generators and electric motors were available, 150 years of steam & fossil fuels would be skipped entirely.
Humans entered the 1,800s at 6 miles an hour, the speed of a walking man or loaded wagon, livestock pulling a boat up stream.
Humans entered the 1,900s at 60 miles an hour, the average speed of a non stop express train.
Humans entered the 2,000s at 600 miles an hour, the speed of an average commercial jet.

Railroads suppressed alternative forms of transportation for over 100 years, it took WWII to get highways built.
The first 'Cars' were electric.
Petroleum companies suppressed battery & EV technology for nearly 100 years, and by hook or crook, managed to kill electric public transportation.
They are still trying to delay/kill electric vehicles...

Can you imagine what it would look like now with a 200+ year jump on battery technology?
The huff & puff steam engines replaced by two wires over a rail road track, trains capable of 150 miles per hour in just 30-50 years with a reliable steel production method, precise machining and hardened roller bearings...
No 'Smoke Stack' pollution if it were done correctly.
A WHOLE lot cleaner environment saving all the sickness, dying, Superfund cleanup sites, etc.

Now, I don't know much about medicine, but I would fund the crap out of research and proved any equipment the researchers needed.
Even hit & miss, with unlimited funding & equipment, a direction to head, things would progress much faster than it did.
Researchers have always had to scratch for resources...

Another "What If?"
IF the predominant technology & manufacturing company/companies refused to allow lead in paint & toys, water lines, protection for miners, asbestos use kept to a minimum and workers protected, all of the chemical mistakes made over the past 200 years didn't happen?
No Love Canal, Times Beach, etc.

Along with being a Constitutionalist I'm a student of Ben Franklin, "If you do well, Do good"
If you have a smidge of self control, you would quickly make way more money than you, or any of your decendants could ever spend,
Why not do good?
Franklin built the sewer system in Philadelphia, which much of is still in use today because it was so well designed and built.
Mostly funded by Franklin himself.
Franklin gave away rights to lightening rods so everyone could afford them.

I'd probably do the same with home canning once I carried away the French 'X' prize.
It would make plenty of money just producing the canners, jars, lids, etc.
No sense in gouging the people least able to afford the products.

 

[hopper68]

I suggest the Eric Clint series about a Virginia city transplanted back to Germany. 1632 is the first book and it delves into the technological and political challenges one would encounter.

 

[JeepHammer]

I suggest the Eric Clint series about a Virginia city transplanted back to Germany. 1632 is the first book and it delves into the technological and political challenges one would encounter.

I don't read fiction.
Reading sticks it in my head and I have to sort though what's real and what was fiction when I need linear thinking.
Seeing or hearing fiction doesn't stick, but I find fiction boring since 99.9% of the time it's full of holes that ruin it for me.

 

[rhino]

This quiz is not about financial gains but surviving the journey. Any gains would be secondary. If my property showed up I would be (as Rhino stated) burned at the stack.....After I ran through my fuel and ammo reserves.

A few mags of 5.56x45mm from and AR would be somewhat disconcerting to our early 1800s counterparts! For a while.

 

[hopper68]

I don't read fiction.
Reading sticks it in my head and I have to sort though what's real and what was fiction when I need linear thinking.
Seeing or hearing fiction doesn't stick, but I find fiction boring since 99.9% of the time it's full of holes that ruin it for me.

The series tries to give an honest look at the problems of trying to adapt modern tech to old world manufacturing. Even more so in the Grantville Gazette side stories. In a discussion such as this thread it helps to point out things that might have been forgotten. And there is even a publisher's forum so people can discuss what they got right and what they got wrong.

https://bar.baen.com/

https://www.baen.com/1632.html

 

[JeepHammer]

Still fiction, so for me a waste of time and memory.
For others, who knows?

I learned about this before the internet, and this expands on what I learned then.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=djB9oK6pkbA&t=609s

While turning machines had been around for centuries, see the undercuts on some of the pharos statues and buildings, most were lost to history,
After the fall of the Roman empire, lathes/turning machines had to be re-invented, and started out small, not very accurate or repeatable.

Before tool steel, and later high speed steel, cutting was more like chewing or grinding.
When the tool bit is no harder than the material you are cutting, it's more of a chewing or gouging process than a cut.

But frankly I'd kick off with canning/food preservation through sterilization.
Glass bottles with ground stoppers, small tin or glass lids for jars were already around,
So we're hard wax sealers.
All you needed was a pressure vessel to do the sterilization and you would win the 'X' prize, instant, serious cash.

I believe I would stay away from lead tubes, cans, etc. Those caused a LOT of problems, but were used a LONG time simply because lead was so cheap because it was easy to work with.

While a couple have expressed concern about being labeled a witch,
The early 1800's wasn't that type of environment, inventers were highly celebrated like Ben Franklin, Fulton of steam engine fame, anything electrical was a parlor truck that was highly prized.
Weak batteries & static generators were the order of the day in 1804,
The first guy to put serious power generation into production, and an efficient motor on the market would clean up in a huge way.
Steam engines would be difficult to make, dangerous & underpowered for another 50 years, it was a metallurgy issue, no way to produce quality steel.

And that brings me to the second part,
With electrical power, you simply skip the blast furnace era and go directly to electrical arc furnaces.
Instant high grade steel in any quantity, production only limited by the power you can generate.

That also means metals MUCH harder than steel, which allows for efficient & accurate machining.
It would be crank & fixture machining, but assembly line machining as we know it, not some little hand cranked turning machine...

You call the old iron beaters 'Black Smiths' because old pig iron was more black than anything.
If you could make what we think of as common grade of steel (gray metal), someplace between high grade cast iron and full on steel, metallurgy would jump forward 100 years.

Then crank out tool steel or high speed steel to machine it with, and you would push machining forward 130 years.

This was the golden age of science & mechanical technology, 1800 to 1950s,
Arc furnaces allowed for exotic metals and the electro-chemical process in the 1930s for aluminum extraction, and between 1930s & 1969 we went from steam engines and canvas planes to the moon.

It was the golden age of pure science, and if it hadn't been thrown for a loop making weapons for several wars, it would have progressed much faster.

 

[ClydeB]

I'm a fan of the 1634 book series and the "Back To The Future" movies. So I will take a stab at this.

I hoard digital knowledge. It scratches the itch to "collect" stuff and does not take up much space. This collection includes:
* The entire Survivor Library as of earlier this year when I last refreshed it. And that means I have pdf copies of all sorts of books of howto's from the pre computer era. Even books published back within the lifetime of someone native of the 1804
* other historical documents such as encyclopedia's
* Gun blueprints for things like the AK 47
* Military field manuals etc...

Also have battery powered devices such as a laptop, ebook reader, and small solar chargers. Plus some non coin silver rounds

My idea would be to make my way down to the Port of Louisville (which did exist back then) on the Ohio River. Go native for a bit, then portage downstream to someplace like New Orleans. Set myself up as a writer and start transcribing what would be for them next generation stuff down on paper and selling it.

 

[BigBoxaJunk]

Only problem is the tech of that period is way to far behind what would be needed. I could not take credit for the 1911......I would be long dead.....

Yeah you're right, now that I think about it. 1804 is way back before most of the things we'd be familiar with could even be applied or appreciated.

We'd have to re-think, like maybe not take credit for the 1911, but maybe we could take credit for the Minnie Ball?

The safety pin?

 

[churchmouse]

Yeah you're right, now that I think about it. 1804 is way back before most of the things we'd be familiar with could even be applied or appreciated.

We'd have to re-think, like maybe not take credit for the 1911, but maybe we could take credit for the Minnie Ball?

The safety pin?

Spring steel......????

 

[mrm]

If my track record on Oregon trail is any idicator, i would die of dysentery.... over amd over and over again.