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Something that continually just blows my mind is how new spinning wheels are. The most plausible range of time of arrival of the wheel in European contexts is

Something that continually just blows my mind is how new spinning wheels are. The most plausible range of time of arrival of the wheel in European contexts is between the mid-1200s to about 1340, which means that textiles produced previously to that were made with drop spindles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_(textiles)#Hand_spindles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_(textiles)#Hand_spindl... That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more staggering ideas like hand-spinning all the fabric for sails for ships, which is a seriously nontrivial amount of time!

lumost 5y ago
It’s curious, if you go back in time far enough with all knowledge from the present, you’d surely arrive at a point where you still need to work your entire life to bring one component of one innovation to life. Even then, the innovation would be unlikely to survive your death due to other missing parts of the supply chain. Try building a musket in Ancient Greece, you’d need to start with building the steel supply chain - which means drilling into granite with wooden and bronze hand tools…
- chopin 5y ago
  I am pretty sure you could build a musket from bronze. Afaik the early cannons where made of it. Sourcing of the ingredients for black powder might have been harder.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Cannons were cast however and musket barrels aren't. It's unclear you could make the barrels thick/strong enough to be useful. (At some point, you end up with something probably less useful than a refined bow design.) In general, with these scenarios, another variable is do you just wake up in another time or do you have time to prepare, maybe have reference books/artifacts, figure out what you can do given technology and material availability, maybe learn the language, etc.
    - xyzzyz 5y ago
      Yes, you very much could build an effective firearm using bronze or brass. Brass barrels were quite commonly used historically. They are less suitable for modern, high pressure propellants, but for black powder firearms, they’ll work just fine.
- rsecora 5y ago
  Right, and getting the finance to start the journey will be problematic. The elevator pitch for the musket will sound like black magic.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    In ancient Greece, I wouldn't be surprised if a crossbow (a bow that can be used with relatively little training!) wouldn't be more useful than very primitive firearms.
    - smhenderson 5y ago
      Ancient Greece had the ballista as early as 400 BC so this also wouldn't have seemed that magic or mysterious to them as well.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    I'm not sure even with an unlimited budget you could get metals that would work as a musket. A cannon could be done if you know how, but the cost of that much metal would mean you would need the unlimited budget.
    - mywittyname 5y ago
      One could probably build a cannon out of mostly wood, with some banding for strategic reinforcement. It would be fucking dangerous to operate and might not be all that effective. But my understanding is that the early cannons mainly worked by striking so much fear into people, that they surrendered without resistance. The machines used to bore cannon holes into logs (lathes) would probably be nearly as profitable as the cannons themselves. And one could presumably use their cannon production business to finance their lathe-building business. Oh, and there's always dynamite.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Black powder bronze firearms did apparently exist historically. Note that bronze is a fairly broad term for a range of alloys, some of which I'm guessing didn't exist in the "bronze age."
- Shaanie 5y ago
  I wonder which modern information would be actually useful a thousand years ago. Things like electricity, cumbustion engine etc wouldn't be very useful, but perhaps something steam-powered? One low-hanging fruit would be sterilization and hand-washing for medical operations, at least.
  - goda90 5y ago
    Humans have been working with glass for a really long time. I wonder how hard it would be to make a microscope and kick off germ theory and antibiotics and such back then.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    As someone mentioned on a different thread, a printing press would make a massive difference. The wine presses of 1022 were people standing on grapes in a box, so that could be significantly improved too. Significant steam power (so not that ancient Greek toy) might prove too difficult for the engineering of the era, but a pressure cooker might be possible as it’s allowed to leak. Screw cutting lathes, and in particular the guided toolpaths to make the output reliable and consistent, would be a big deal. Might be able to bootstrap enough magnets and wires for basic electricity, at which point you can make much better compasses — the Chinese were the first to go beyond lodestones and that was about 1000 years ago — and electricity makes electroplating possible and some acids (e.g. hydrochloric) and alkalis (e.g. sodium hydroxide) basically trivial. Float glass would radically increase the size and quality of individual windows panes. Knowing that lead oxide reduces the melting point would make manufacture much easier. Wikipedia’s list of medieval technology has some interesting surprises: apparently wheelbarrows are only about 850 years old, hourglasses and segmented arch bridges only about 680 years old.
- showerst 5y ago
  There's a bunch of youtube channels with various takes on "starting from scratch". It seems like a mix of things that are very hard to bootstrap (metal being a big one!), and things that were more coincidental (lathes, saddles and riding gear, spinning looms). Having a modern high school math education would make you the greatest mathematician in history up to about Newton, but more practically speaking I'm thinking that if you understood the principles behind good charcoal, a wood lathe, and how concrete and mortar actually work you could probably kick civilization up at least a few hundred years. I'm envisioning something like this -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IShxXtAev9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IShxXtAev9U although they do rely on 18th century metals there you could start from less. There's a great clickspring series where he thinks about what kind of knowledge and tools would be required to build the antikythera mechanism, I think that's a great example of "master tradesman that got surprisingly far by dedication to a few small areas, but then that knowledge was lost".
  - jaclaz 5y ago
    Not the best example (IMHO): >how concrete and mortar actually work Would you tell Roman engineers how to deal with those? (they actually invented it, and - for certain applications - their concrete is still superior to modern one)
    - showerst 5y ago
      I was thinking in terms of ancient Greece like the GP mentioned. That said, Romans invented and pioneered concrete, but they didn't really understand how or why it worked, it was just centuries of excellent trial and error. They also had problems replicating it out of base materials other than volcanic ash. Now that said I have my doubts that there are that many people on earth who could build better concrete for a given application than the Romans with no store to go buy pure materials from, I'm certainly not one of them. That's also why I didn't talk about modern steel -- In my head I vaguely understand that there's a chain from copper to wire to a rotor/stator to electrolysis to oxygen gas to the Bessemer process, but I'd be amazed if there's anyone on earth who could bootstrap it in one lifetime, even with an ancient king's resources.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  Well even that would vary widely. Some places it's easier to extract iron ore than others, or you could just melt down a meteorite and use that iron/steel to mine more ore. Drilling also isn't necessarily so hard. Neolithic Chinese built perfectly circular discs out of jade, an extremely hard stone. They had no metal tools. It's possible that they could have developed more sophisticated equipment for mining rock, if they realized what they could do with it once they extracted it. https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/mysterious-origin-jade-discs-00943 https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/myster...
- retrac 5y ago
  Yes, you wouldn't be building a steam engine with the tools of Greek artisans in antiquity, not even the ones who built the Antikythera mechanism. But we do know some things that would seem like crazy hacks to the ancients. For example, I know a simple trick. I can multiply numbers, of arbitrary size. And I can do it in a few seconds using just a stylus and tablet. This would have blown the minds of a learned Roman or Greek from that time. For those who find the general idea enticing, there was a book written about 80 years ago on this idea. What if a time traveller got sent back to Ancient Rome? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall A couple friends and I are big fans of the book, and premise. We always figured it was far too optimistic. Most likely you'd die of dysentery or be sold off into slavery. But assuming not, I figure the real path to power wouldn't be brandy, but strong acids and electroplating.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    I bet most STEM related people could work out how to produce lot or trig tables with a little thinking. I wonder if the ancient Greeks would appreciate those. Edit: It turns out they could produce their own for trig functions and wouldn't have been all that impressed by the log table because they didn't have logs.
    - abecedarius 5y ago
      Slides rules, though. Although it'd be nontrivial to make them, and I'm not sure where the demand would come from. For some of the same practical engineering approximations they might use compass and straightedge instead.
      - bee_rider 5y ago
        I never had the chance to use a sliderule, unfortunately. In general (I'm sure someone's dug incredibly deep on this topic and can tell me exactly why I'm wrong), the pre-digital/electronic-computer era of engineering seems to have been really focused on doing log based calculations, which makes sense -- a good design has tolerances such that you only have to be right in the order of magnitude, right? This seems like it would much more appropriate to share with ancient civilizations. No need to waste precision when the implementation is going to be done with an hammer and chisel. I will only be useful if you can convince ancient Greek computers to go out to E-15, haha.
- bluGill 5y ago
  If you have woodworking skills you could make a crude but working spinning wheel in about a week with crude tools. They are simple machines once you understand them, and most of it can be made crude and still work. The idea is what is hard not the construction which is why once one was made it spread fast. I suspect (I think Bret Devereaux would agree) that if the males who were allowed to be creative had thought about women's work at all they would have made one several thousand years before. I wouldn't be surprised is some unknown woman did create something close on her own but society norms meant it didn't spread (if this happened all evidence would have burned/rotted - Luddites of the day may have destroyed it and the inventor). As a modern educated man I'd turn much of my attention to "women's work" first - in large part because there is low hanging fruit there that would make my life better. The spinning wheel and looms would be a great changer, and something I think just having seen one in a history museum and a few weeks to watch how women work would allow me to make things work, then a few months in the woods to make a prototype. For "men's work" things are harder because society allowed smart men to think about improvements. Maybe I could create gunpowder, but I would prefer to focus my war efforts on a good defense. I know good steel has controlled amounts of manganese and carbon in it (I'm sure more than those two), but I don't know how to control those amounts and my visits to museums and chemistry classes haven't given me enough information to think I could create those from scratch. That is before we consider the amount of labor needed to get the ore. (though if metal is available I'd make a steam engine) Note that the above assumes I end up in or near Europe. I have no idea if any of societies on the other continents could support the above efforts.
  - vagrantJin 5y ago
- aledalgrande 5y ago
  Related to this if you like the topic and anime, watch Dr. Stone.
- ajuc 5y ago
  There's this "Conrad Stargard" book series about an engineer going back in time to 13th century Poland and starting industrial revolution there. The book is VERY, VERY sexist with a strong dose of ephebophilia, the hero is 100% Gary Stu with Catholic-supremacy mania, but the engineering challenges and solutions are quite well presented. The trick was to get a powerful patron early and adapt the technology to the limitations and the engineering looked pretty realistic to me. For example he makes rails but no locomotives because pulling standarized cars with standarized containers along low-friction rails already brings most of the benefits of modern transport network and is much easier than designing a steam locomotive in 1230s. There's a lot about industrializing cloth production there, too and it's quite detailed. I liked it despite all the awful stuff.
- pomian 5y ago
  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court. A novel by Mark Twain. it is really fun.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- jewel 5y ago
  There's a book roughly on that topic called "How to Invent Everything" that I enjoyed, but I'm not sure I remember enough of it now to be of any good, so I'm going to be sure to grab it before going back in time. Also along the same lines is "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm", which I also enjoyed and keep a copy around just in case.
- kragen 5y ago
  Would you? Maybe it depends on how hard you have to struggle merely to survive and how much freedom you have. If you were a helot in ancient Sparta you'd have to be careful not to draw the attention of the Spartiates; they'd kill you for sport if they thought you were too virtuous. What is this about drilling into granite? The Egyptians were drilling into granite a thousand years earlier using copper tube drills and quartz sand, which they probably could have drilled a lot faster if they'd known about emery, but I don't understand where granite drilling fits into the steel supply chain. But with freedom and some way to survive you can get pretty far. In only four and a half years, apparently without using modern materials other than a video camera and writing instruments, John Plant was able to bootstrap from sticks and stones up to celt axes, coarse pants (spun of course with a drop spindle), a centrifugal blower, iron smelting powered by it, fired bricks, several huts, ceramic tile roofs, underfloor heating, cob construction, bow and arrow, atlatl, lime cement, wood ash cement, crawfish traps, rock-heated soup pots, charcoal burning, a pump drill, and a monjolo. He hasn't yet been able to smelt enough iron to make so much as a fishhook, though, and Australian law doesn't allow him to hunt animals for sinew, leather, catgut, bone, and bladder. A thing he's missing so far is metrology, which is very important for chemistry and for muskets and other machines. He also doesn't have much in the way of chemical resources on his land: no saltpeter and no concentrated salt, though he could perhaps purify them from urine. Still, imagine how far he could get in 40 years with all the knowledge from the present and without those restrictions. It's an amazing contrast to what most of us have achieved in modern life with much more resources. https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/ https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology
slowhand09 5y ago
A lifetime ago I worked in a textile mill in the US. After a several months I worked my way up to be a machine operator, a weaver. I had upwards of 50 weaving machines I kept operating thru my shift. Each of these produced probably 80meters * 6meters of fabric in an 8 hour shift. And at this rate, mills in southeast asia were able to undercut prices so much the US industry collapsed.
- ch4s3 5y ago
  It's pretty amazing how much efficient you can build in if you're starting a process from scratch and know what the first mover did. This is precisely how the US pushed the UK out of the textile business. It's no wonder that it happened again after another series of innovations.
- coupdejarnac 5y ago
  How old were the machinese you operated? I'm imagining turn of the century steam powered weavers. :)
  - slowhand09 5y ago
    They were state of the art MAV Rapier machines, in mid 1970's. They didn't use shuttles, but instead had rapiers that transported the fibers across the weave.
unemphysbro 5y ago
I'd imagine creating uniform and robust ball-bearings is not an easy feat.
- progman32 5y ago
  Fortunately poured bearings (i.e., with Babbitt alloys) are much easier to create! You pour it into a shell with the shaft already installed. It's just tin and lead with a couple percent copper and antimony. Now, getting a perfectly round shaft... also tough.
jacobolus 5y ago
How much faster is a spinning wheel (of typical 500-year-old design, say) vs. a drop spindle, in the hands of someone with 20 years of spinning experience? And can the spinning wheel produce yarn that has similar quality? From skimming around online, it seems that expert spinners get extremely fast with a drop spindle, and can produce higher quality yarn. But I can’t find a definitive answer about the comparative speed.
- nabilhat 5y ago
  Drop spindles don't spin continuously, which gives the wheel an uptime advantage. Even modern spinners who prefer a drop spindle often have a wheel on hand for plying. Spinning a thread out of a blob of fluff can be engaging and interesting, while plying is a tedious process that's hard to get wrong without falling asleep in the middle. There's not really an art or skill to plying. A wheel can knock out this boring part of the spinning process much more quickly.
morsch 5y ago
In a similar vein, I was astonished to read how much time was spent on spinning before the invention of the spinning wheel: Consequently, spinning thread may have been the single most frequently performed work-task in the ancient world (the various farming tasks being more varied and more seasonal, while spinning was being done continuously all year round). We tend to think of the pre-modern world as a world of farmers (and it was) but we ought just as well to think of it as a world of spinnners. I had no idea! From https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-iii-spin-me-right-round/ https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t... The spinning wheel started out being three times more productive (at a somewhat reduced quality) and then, within a century or two, ten times more productive than the previous method. Needless to say, a reduction in labor time potentially close to an order of magnitude in the most labor-intensive part (again, c. 80% of the labor time!) of textile production had enormous economic impacts (...). English cloth production tripled (measured by weight) between 1315 and 1545 and cloth produced per capita increased five-fold.
bsder 5y ago
> That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more staggering ideas like hand-spinning all the fabric for sails for ships, which is a seriously nontrivial amount of time! The problem is that there is push and pull. The Cotton Gin is quite famous about this. Anyone could have invented the cotton gin--and lots probably did. The problem is that nobody needed an order of magnitude more cotton--until they did. And once they did need more cotton--hey, presto--the cotton gin becomes widespread.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Even knitting dates back only to about 1100 AD, which somewhat staggers me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  Well, yes, but it has very similar ancestors that are a bunch older: naalbinding, for example, is (probably) at least as old as the Mesolithic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding I know some very … enthusiastic … knitters who are keen to tell me how old knitting “really” is, but it smells a bit like “well, obviously…!” special pleading. I have a naalbound and then felted cap. It is absurdly warm: unwearable with regular exertion in temperatures above -9C or so.

lumost 5y ago

It’s curious, if you go back in time far enough with all knowledge from the present, you’d surely arrive at a point where you still need to work your entire life to bring one component of one innovation to life. Even then, the innovation would be unlikely to survive your death due to other missing parts of the supply chain. Try building a musket in Ancient Greece, you’d need to start with building the steel supply chain - which means drilling into granite with wooden and bronze hand tools…

chopin 5y ago
I am pretty sure you could build a musket from bronze. Afaik the early cannons where made of it. Sourcing of the ingredients for black powder might have been harder.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Cannons were cast however and musket barrels aren't. It's unclear you could make the barrels thick/strong enough to be useful. (At some point, you end up with something probably less useful than a refined bow design.) In general, with these scenarios, another variable is do you just wake up in another time or do you have time to prepare, maybe have reference books/artifacts, figure out what you can do given technology and material availability, maybe learn the language, etc.
  - xyzzyz 5y ago
    Yes, you very much could build an effective firearm using bronze or brass. Brass barrels were quite commonly used historically. They are less suitable for modern, high pressure propellants, but for black powder firearms, they’ll work just fine.
rsecora 5y ago
Right, and getting the finance to start the journey will be problematic. The elevator pitch for the musket will sound like black magic.
- ghaff 5y ago
  In ancient Greece, I wouldn't be surprised if a crossbow (a bow that can be used with relatively little training!) wouldn't be more useful than very primitive firearms.
  - smhenderson 5y ago
    Ancient Greece had the ballista as early as 400 BC so this also wouldn't have seemed that magic or mysterious to them as well.
- bluGill 5y ago
  I'm not sure even with an unlimited budget you could get metals that would work as a musket. A cannon could be done if you know how, but the cost of that much metal would mean you would need the unlimited budget.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    One could probably build a cannon out of mostly wood, with some banding for strategic reinforcement. It would be fucking dangerous to operate and might not be all that effective. But my understanding is that the early cannons mainly worked by striking so much fear into people, that they surrendered without resistance. The machines used to bore cannon holes into logs (lathes) would probably be nearly as profitable as the cannons themselves. And one could presumably use their cannon production business to finance their lathe-building business. Oh, and there's always dynamite.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Black powder bronze firearms did apparently exist historically. Note that bronze is a fairly broad term for a range of alloys, some of which I'm guessing didn't exist in the "bronze age."
Shaanie 5y ago
I wonder which modern information would be actually useful a thousand years ago. Things like electricity, cumbustion engine etc wouldn't be very useful, but perhaps something steam-powered? One low-hanging fruit would be sterilization and hand-washing for medical operations, at least.
- goda90 5y ago
  Humans have been working with glass for a really long time. I wonder how hard it would be to make a microscope and kick off germ theory and antibiotics and such back then.
- ben_w 5y ago
  As someone mentioned on a different thread, a printing press would make a massive difference. The wine presses of 1022 were people standing on grapes in a box, so that could be significantly improved too. Significant steam power (so not that ancient Greek toy) might prove too difficult for the engineering of the era, but a pressure cooker might be possible as it’s allowed to leak. Screw cutting lathes, and in particular the guided toolpaths to make the output reliable and consistent, would be a big deal. Might be able to bootstrap enough magnets and wires for basic electricity, at which point you can make much better compasses — the Chinese were the first to go beyond lodestones and that was about 1000 years ago — and electricity makes electroplating possible and some acids (e.g. hydrochloric) and alkalis (e.g. sodium hydroxide) basically trivial. Float glass would radically increase the size and quality of individual windows panes. Knowing that lead oxide reduces the melting point would make manufacture much easier. Wikipedia’s list of medieval technology has some interesting surprises: apparently wheelbarrows are only about 850 years old, hourglasses and segmented arch bridges only about 680 years old.
showerst 5y ago
There's a bunch of youtube channels with various takes on "starting from scratch". It seems like a mix of things that are very hard to bootstrap (metal being a big one!), and things that were more coincidental (lathes, saddles and riding gear, spinning looms). Having a modern high school math education would make you the greatest mathematician in history up to about Newton, but more practically speaking I'm thinking that if you understood the principles behind good charcoal, a wood lathe, and how concrete and mortar actually work you could probably kick civilization up at least a few hundred years. I'm envisioning something like this -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IShxXtAev9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IShxXtAev9U although they do rely on 18th century metals there you could start from less. There's a great clickspring series where he thinks about what kind of knowledge and tools would be required to build the antikythera mechanism, I think that's a great example of "master tradesman that got surprisingly far by dedication to a few small areas, but then that knowledge was lost".
- jaclaz 5y ago
  Not the best example (IMHO): >how concrete and mortar actually work Would you tell Roman engineers how to deal with those? (they actually invented it, and - for certain applications - their concrete is still superior to modern one)
  - showerst 5y ago
    I was thinking in terms of ancient Greece like the GP mentioned. That said, Romans invented and pioneered concrete, but they didn't really understand how or why it worked, it was just centuries of excellent trial and error. They also had problems replicating it out of base materials other than volcanic ash. Now that said I have my doubts that there are that many people on earth who could build better concrete for a given application than the Romans with no store to go buy pure materials from, I'm certainly not one of them. That's also why I didn't talk about modern steel -- In my head I vaguely understand that there's a chain from copper to wire to a rotor/stator to electrolysis to oxygen gas to the Bessemer process, but I'd be amazed if there's anyone on earth who could bootstrap it in one lifetime, even with an ancient king's resources.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
Well even that would vary widely. Some places it's easier to extract iron ore than others, or you could just melt down a meteorite and use that iron/steel to mine more ore. Drilling also isn't necessarily so hard. Neolithic Chinese built perfectly circular discs out of jade, an extremely hard stone. They had no metal tools. It's possible that they could have developed more sophisticated equipment for mining rock, if they realized what they could do with it once they extracted it. https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/mysterious-origin-jade-discs-00943 https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/myster...
retrac 5y ago
Yes, you wouldn't be building a steam engine with the tools of Greek artisans in antiquity, not even the ones who built the Antikythera mechanism. But we do know some things that would seem like crazy hacks to the ancients. For example, I know a simple trick. I can multiply numbers, of arbitrary size. And I can do it in a few seconds using just a stylus and tablet. This would have blown the minds of a learned Roman or Greek from that time. For those who find the general idea enticing, there was a book written about 80 years ago on this idea. What if a time traveller got sent back to Ancient Rome? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall A couple friends and I are big fans of the book, and premise. We always figured it was far too optimistic. Most likely you'd die of dysentery or be sold off into slavery. But assuming not, I figure the real path to power wouldn't be brandy, but strong acids and electroplating.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  I bet most STEM related people could work out how to produce lot or trig tables with a little thinking. I wonder if the ancient Greeks would appreciate those. Edit: It turns out they could produce their own for trig functions and wouldn't have been all that impressed by the log table because they didn't have logs.
  - abecedarius 5y ago
    Slides rules, though. Although it'd be nontrivial to make them, and I'm not sure where the demand would come from. For some of the same practical engineering approximations they might use compass and straightedge instead.
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      I never had the chance to use a sliderule, unfortunately. In general (I'm sure someone's dug incredibly deep on this topic and can tell me exactly why I'm wrong), the pre-digital/electronic-computer era of engineering seems to have been really focused on doing log based calculations, which makes sense -- a good design has tolerances such that you only have to be right in the order of magnitude, right? This seems like it would much more appropriate to share with ancient civilizations. No need to waste precision when the implementation is going to be done with an hammer and chisel. I will only be useful if you can convince ancient Greek computers to go out to E-15, haha.
bluGill 5y ago
If you have woodworking skills you could make a crude but working spinning wheel in about a week with crude tools. They are simple machines once you understand them, and most of it can be made crude and still work. The idea is what is hard not the construction which is why once one was made it spread fast. I suspect (I think Bret Devereaux would agree) that if the males who were allowed to be creative had thought about women's work at all they would have made one several thousand years before. I wouldn't be surprised is some unknown woman did create something close on her own but society norms meant it didn't spread (if this happened all evidence would have burned/rotted - Luddites of the day may have destroyed it and the inventor). As a modern educated man I'd turn much of my attention to "women's work" first - in large part because there is low hanging fruit there that would make my life better. The spinning wheel and looms would be a great changer, and something I think just having seen one in a history museum and a few weeks to watch how women work would allow me to make things work, then a few months in the woods to make a prototype. For "men's work" things are harder because society allowed smart men to think about improvements. Maybe I could create gunpowder, but I would prefer to focus my war efforts on a good defense. I know good steel has controlled amounts of manganese and carbon in it (I'm sure more than those two), but I don't know how to control those amounts and my visits to museums and chemistry classes haven't given me enough information to think I could create those from scratch. That is before we consider the amount of labor needed to get the ore. (though if metal is available I'd make a steam engine) Note that the above assumes I end up in or near Europe. I have no idea if any of societies on the other continents could support the above efforts.
- vagrantJin 5y ago
aledalgrande 5y ago
Related to this if you like the topic and anime, watch Dr. Stone.
ajuc 5y ago
There's this "Conrad Stargard" book series about an engineer going back in time to 13th century Poland and starting industrial revolution there. The book is VERY, VERY sexist with a strong dose of ephebophilia, the hero is 100% Gary Stu with Catholic-supremacy mania, but the engineering challenges and solutions are quite well presented. The trick was to get a powerful patron early and adapt the technology to the limitations and the engineering looked pretty realistic to me. For example he makes rails but no locomotives because pulling standarized cars with standarized containers along low-friction rails already brings most of the benefits of modern transport network and is much easier than designing a steam locomotive in 1230s. There's a lot about industrializing cloth production there, too and it's quite detailed. I liked it despite all the awful stuff.
pomian 5y ago
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court. A novel by Mark Twain. it is really fun.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jewel 5y ago
There's a book roughly on that topic called "How to Invent Everything" that I enjoyed, but I'm not sure I remember enough of it now to be of any good, so I'm going to be sure to grab it before going back in time. Also along the same lines is "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm", which I also enjoyed and keep a copy around just in case.
kragen 5y ago
Would you? Maybe it depends on how hard you have to struggle merely to survive and how much freedom you have. If you were a helot in ancient Sparta you'd have to be careful not to draw the attention of the Spartiates; they'd kill you for sport if they thought you were too virtuous. What is this about drilling into granite? The Egyptians were drilling into granite a thousand years earlier using copper tube drills and quartz sand, which they probably could have drilled a lot faster if they'd known about emery, but I don't understand where granite drilling fits into the steel supply chain. But with freedom and some way to survive you can get pretty far. In only four and a half years, apparently without using modern materials other than a video camera and writing instruments, John Plant was able to bootstrap from sticks and stones up to celt axes, coarse pants (spun of course with a drop spindle), a centrifugal blower, iron smelting powered by it, fired bricks, several huts, ceramic tile roofs, underfloor heating, cob construction, bow and arrow, atlatl, lime cement, wood ash cement, crawfish traps, rock-heated soup pots, charcoal burning, a pump drill, and a monjolo. He hasn't yet been able to smelt enough iron to make so much as a fishhook, though, and Australian law doesn't allow him to hunt animals for sinew, leather, catgut, bone, and bladder. A thing he's missing so far is metrology, which is very important for chemistry and for muskets and other machines. He also doesn't have much in the way of chemical resources on his land: no saltpeter and no concentrated salt, though he could perhaps purify them from urine. Still, imagine how far he could get in 40 years with all the knowledge from the present and without those restrictions. It's an amazing contrast to what most of us have achieved in modern life with much more resources. https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/ https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology

slowhand09 5y ago

A lifetime ago I worked in a textile mill in the US. After a several months I worked my way up to be a machine operator, a weaver. I had upwards of 50 weaving machines I kept operating thru my shift. Each of these produced probably 80meters * 6meters of fabric in an 8 hour shift. And at this rate, mills in southeast asia were able to undercut prices so much the US industry collapsed.

ch4s3 5y ago
It's pretty amazing how much efficient you can build in if you're starting a process from scratch and know what the first mover did. This is precisely how the US pushed the UK out of the textile business. It's no wonder that it happened again after another series of innovations.
coupdejarnac 5y ago
How old were the machinese you operated? I'm imagining turn of the century steam powered weavers. :)
- slowhand09 5y ago
  They were state of the art MAV Rapier machines, in mid 1970's. They didn't use shuttles, but instead had rapiers that transported the fibers across the weave.

unemphysbro 5y ago

I'd imagine creating uniform and robust ball-bearings is not an easy feat.

progman32 5y ago
Fortunately poured bearings (i.e., with Babbitt alloys) are much easier to create! You pour it into a shell with the shaft already installed. It's just tin and lead with a couple percent copper and antimony. Now, getting a perfectly round shaft... also tough.

jacobolus 5y ago

How much faster is a spinning wheel (of typical 500-year-old design, say) vs. a drop spindle, in the hands of someone with 20 years of spinning experience? And can the spinning wheel produce yarn that has similar quality? From skimming around online, it seems that expert spinners get extremely fast with a drop spindle, and can produce higher quality yarn. But I can’t find a definitive answer about the comparative speed.

nabilhat 5y ago
Drop spindles don't spin continuously, which gives the wheel an uptime advantage. Even modern spinners who prefer a drop spindle often have a wheel on hand for plying. Spinning a thread out of a blob of fluff can be engaging and interesting, while plying is a tedious process that's hard to get wrong without falling asleep in the middle. There's not really an art or skill to plying. A wheel can knock out this boring part of the spinning process much more quickly.

morsch 5y ago

In a similar vein, I was astonished to read how much time was spent on spinning before the invention of the spinning wheel: Consequently, spinning thread may have been the single most frequently performed work-task in the ancient world (the various farming tasks being more varied and more seasonal, while spinning was being done continuously all year round). We tend to think of the pre-modern world as a world of farmers (and it was) but we ought just as well to think of it as a world of spinnners. I had no idea! From https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-iii-spin-me-right-round/ https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t... The spinning wheel started out being three times more productive (at a somewhat reduced quality) and then, within a century or two, ten times more productive than the previous method. Needless to say, a reduction in labor time potentially close to an order of magnitude in the most labor-intensive part (again, c. 80% of the labor time!) of textile production had enormous economic impacts (...). English cloth production tripled (measured by weight) between 1315 and 1545 and cloth produced per capita increased five-fold.

bsder 5y ago

> That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more staggering ideas like hand-spinning all the fabric for sails for ships, which is a seriously nontrivial amount of time! The problem is that there is push and pull. The Cotton Gin is quite famous about this. Anyone could have invented the cotton gin--and lots probably did. The problem is that nobody needed an order of magnitude more cotton--until they did. And once they did need more cotton--hey, presto--the cotton gin becomes widespread.

dredmorbius 5y ago

Even knitting dates back only to about 1100 AD, which somewhat staggers me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting

hprotagonist 5y ago
Well, yes, but it has very similar ancestors that are a bunch older: naalbinding, for example, is (probably) at least as old as the Mesolithic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding I know some very … enthusiastic … knitters who are keen to tell me how old knitting “really” is, but it smells a bit like “well, obviously…!” special pleading. I have a naalbound and then felted cap. It is absurdly warm: unwearable with regular exertion in temperatures above -9C or so.