If a person was sent back to about 1600 in a time machine........?

Question

...what inventions or discoveries could they help the people realise????

Personally I think it could be quite hard to show them new inventions. For instance, even steam power would necessitate the invention of new metal-working processes etc.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

Answer 1

Probably few or none, because the average person (myself included) is remarkably ignorant of how things are made. In 1600 some things we take for granted just couldn't be made easily because the resources for them (aluminium ore for example) mostly come from places that hadn't been found by the Western world at that time.

The easiest area to make progress in with limited resources would I think be medicine. Digitalis is just made from ground up dried foxglove leaves (in fact as far as I know this drug is still extracted from natural sources). Penicillin is naturally occurring - although I'm not sure how you would find it. Simply knowing about the need for sterile conditions could be a real breakthrough. Knowing that cholera is carried in water could help save countless lives - without needing any more equipment than a kettle to boil water in.

Hope this helps.

It was suggested (and I can't remember by whom) that the best solution to helping humanity survive a nuclear holocaust would be to engrave fundamental human knowledge - probably starting with how to make a stone axe - on tablets of stone and placing them in some key places (not where they are likely to be destroyed) so that afterwards whoever survives has some way of getting back a fraction of the civilisation we have now on the basis that in the long term you cannot use what you cannot make.

Answer 2

Call me stupid but I can't even set the clock on the microwave let alone explain antibiotics. If I went back to the 1950's and said , 'What you really ought to have in every home are three cars, three computers, three toilets, another home just for the holidays and at least 25 feng shui candles burning while you enjoy an Indian meal', what would people say? I think 17th century folk would lock me up as an idiot!

Answer 3

trevithic would have loved us... and what do you thnk happened in the 1700c? that was the start of the industrial revolution. abraham derby used coke to smelt iron... for the first time... look at ironbridge...

the already knew the basics, and all moder engineers could have done is shown them some refinements to their processes.

England in the 1600 -1700 was a THE hotspot for technological advancement... we already had mechanisation in our mills and were using beam engines, driven fisrt by water wheels and then by steam... and if we'd had these advances made possible by "modern" technology, then the English flag would have been flown EVERYWHERE... we would have annexed the whole planet, instead of 1/3 of it... and there would be no america... just New England

Answer 4

You would have to take a class of a lot of people from a very young age, (I'm talking 2 years old!) and tutor them up to the point of knowlege and understanding you have. That would be an extremely quick way of erasing the need for the proceding few centuries!

Answer 5

i think that time macine is exist because if somebody events time machine in 3000 then the invention can travel to all the times and also technology can travel too. that means that they have door keepers for that. and these door keepers are the priests from any realigion, some realigions less some more. wizards for example use technology from the future like merilyn was doing, but this is my imagination

Answer 6

Germ Theory of Disease and Fermentation-the importance of cleanliness for open wounds vitamin deficiency diseases
The theory of evolution, geology, map of the world, no Northwest passage, plate tectonics
Newtonian mechanics, calculus pendulum clocks, optics, microscope
matter made from elements which form simple compounds
thermometer
crop rotation with legumes

Answer 7

You've got some good points. Of course the only way to know would be to try it. However, it colud turn in to one of those "If i went back and killed my Grandfather" things, where we come back and the world as WE knew it before we left is completley different.

Answer 8

that's really nice to have this machine i would use it to go back and change some of my mistakes in my life but any way that was not the question. i think i would till them have fun in your life time, because it will only get worse and try to keep your life simple.

Answer 9

I would push the use of steam powered cars.

Answer 10

Be careful ... show them too much and you'll be branded a wizard or witch and burned at the stake