Even if you studied it, the answer boils down to “magic”.
You take these magnets, and move them around these long snakes of metal (because electrons can move easily through metal) and that makes the electrons in the wires move.
Okay, why does moving around a magnet near metal make something inside it move?
Well there’s something we call the “Lorentz force” which basically pushes a magnetic thing in a specific way if you move another magnetic thing around it
It’s all attraction between opposite charge and repulsion for the same charge, even magnetism. Magnetism is just charge in another gauge.
What I mean by this is from our perspective we view a moving charged particle as emitting a magnetic field, but if you were to move along with the particle at the same speed it would be observed as being at rest and emitting an electric field.
I mean, from this thread it shows people kinda remember stuff from those classes, but are missing a lot. Which is understandable, people left school and didn’t use that information, it doesn’t make you stupid.
But then you think, oh yeah! I remember how to make electricity, I need copper and an iron rock! So you spend all this time trying to manufacture some relatively thin copper wire, iron would probably be a little easier to find, wrap it around and then you’re like… Okay what went wrong? Annnnd you can’t remember you actually needed a magnet and you gotta spin it.
Then do you remember learning how to store it? Connect it to anything useful? Maybe kinda, but extrapolate the first situation to every topic ever and that’s what you’d get, half baked ideas that you don’t really remember the specifics of. And the specifics really actually matter lol.
It isn’t so hard really, to make electricity even in the olden days.
A dynamo is just a copper wire with a magnet spinning inside.
Making a copper wire you can accomplish by having a hole at the bottom of a kiln that drops directly into a big vat of water. Or even just drawing a line in the sand and pouring it in there.
Getting your hands on a natural magnet might pose more problems, but ultimately those are found in nature. So they should have already been dug up by someone.
Using the electricity usefully is harder. Since creating a light bulb needs access to gasses. What could we even use the electricity for?
If you can make a dynamo, you can make a motor. Now, you aren’t about to create Tesla. But there’s plenty of things back in the day that could benefit from being motorized.
Could you also do ac/dc conversion to make the electricity useful elsewhere? I’m guessing charging and transporting primitive batteries won’t be able to fulfill any useful purpose at all.
You can create light with electricity with two carbon rods to make an arc light. It was literally the first electric light source and in widespread use for a long while, along with incandescent bulbs.
If you could find a jeweller and had an understanding of basic electrical systems, you could probably get a rudimentary capacitor and engine going. From there, who knows what you could do. Maybe even lightbulbs.
You could fill it with co2 .put an animal bladder on the mouth of a clay bottle where something is fermenting like wine or beer. The yeast will produce a fair ammount of c02 and fill the bladder. Use the bladder to fill the bulb. It wont last long but it will be longer than just air
In Sid Meier’s Civilization sure, but real history is a lot more complex than that. There were people who came to that conclusion since ancient times without it leading to a scientific and industrial revolution, because there were a lot more factors at play with those than just simply the idea of it.
The actual reason science took off is that there was a plague leading to a worker shortage leading to a wealth boom, while a lot of rich people had access to coffee and nothing to do.
While I, too, am a big fan of the Coffee hypothesis, it should be noted that lots of civilizations had access to caffeine and other stimulants, including the Arabs, Chinese and Incas and probably the Roman’s, Greeks and Persians too.
And there were a lot of plagues, but most of them happened long before the scientific revolution.
Free time and the wealth to have that time is what I also think the catalyst is. Same with arts. You can’t do experiments or spend time on art if your entire life is consumed by labor.
speaking of health, wouldn’t you die to some disease you are not immune to? or even more likely you would cause a plague that their bodies don’t lnow how to fight off, like imagine bringing back some covid variant with you.
I mean, us bringing back something to kill them seems more likely, despite our comparatively weak immune system’s. Be it COVID-19 or an STD. Hell, even our metal/plastic ridden bodies would be a potential issue for their environment if we died.
pretty sure you can just use wood or whatever for the lettering, sure it might be kinda shit and tend to break but it should work. having to make new letter stamps every now and then is better than painstakingly writing every letter for hand.
The main problem with that is that you can’t make the types very small with wood, and the singlemost expensive ingredient in this whole printing press concept is the paper.
So you would end up having books with very little text on each page, and especially in a slave economy, it would just be much cheaper to make handwritten copies, since you could cram a lot more words on each page.
And again, this is not adressing the issue of even having the skill to make paper in the first place.
Not to mention inventing an alphabet depending on where and when you go to. Or you could go with ConstantScript if you feel like being a gigantic troll.
Abugida might be workable if you reform it so that vowel markers can only appear above or below the modified consonant.
First of all, no one would understand you, but how someone already pointed out, make a spool with copper and spin it. For bonus points, put a iron slab inside the spool
Edit: as someone pointed out you kinda need a magnet
English has changed a lot (no I’ve not read a lot of poetry in languages other than my own), some others may have changed less. Maybe Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic. Greek has changed but some people know ancient Greek
eh language barriers are generally overstated i think, people with completely unrelated languages develop pidgins within the decade, and if you’re dropped into a place where they speak some complete gibberish like french you’ll still just naturally figure it out given a year or so of being forced to endure it.
maybe, but frankly i think it’s at least equally likely that they just see you as a blessing from the heavens and frankly get a little too enthusiastic about your knowledge.
For anyone interested a simple way is to wrap copper wire around a magnet. Static electricity was also one of the first ways people started noticing electricity.
Parlor tricks might be able to get you far when you time travel to the ancient past.
Fools as i carry with me all of human knowledge, right here in this fragile tiny black slab. I can tell you all once you tell me what your wifi password is.