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Comment by BobaFloutist | Hacker News Reader

Those both seem much easier to me than what I usually struggle with: Transported back to a pre-industrial time, is any of my technological knowledge or understanding even remotely useful?

Like, sure, germ theory is great I guess, but I have no idea how I'd begin to explain the internal combustion engine (which I'm fairly sure requires pretty advanced metallurgy) let alone something as esoteric as solar panels. Hell, how do you generate electricity? I could mumble something about waterwheels, a coil of wires, and a large magnet, but I have no idea how you'd begin to go about sourcing a large magnet. Industrial-scale mining of Africa/Australia, maybe?

Like, I know a lot, and I could explain a good amount about how a lot of this works conceptually, but I couldn't even begin to explain how to actually engineer it. As far as I'm concerned, solar panels come from factories.

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This thought experiment reminds me of Mark Twain's novel "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", in which the main character is a 19th-century American man transported back to 6th-century Britain. He used his experience in firearms manufacture to introduce modern weapons and had bicycles constructed for the knights to ride around on. I always thought it was pretty farfetched that he'd be able to recreate such complex technology without the aid of modern tools, much less set up factories to manufacture it in pre-industrial times. But it is a bit fun to imagine someone using knowledge of modern technology to pose as a wizard. As Arthur C Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Nineteenth century kit wouldn't really be all that difficult to replicate with the materials available in the early middle ages. Even the precision stuff of the time, you can make a surface plate just by scraping an iron sheet. With a surface plate you can make everything else you need. The hard part would be higher quality metallurgy, but it's certainly doable, the Chinese were making cast iron as early as 5th century BCE. Even steel was possible with even Bronze Age equipment.

> Those both seem much easier to me than what I usually struggle with: Transported back to a pre-industrial time, is any of my technological knowledge or understanding even remotely useful?

That's an interesting topic, and there's a whole community that is interested in this. Mostly for historical and educational reasons.

Surprisingly, there are quite a few things you can reasonably do. You will never be able to build a useful internal combustion engine starting in a pre-industrial time. But you'll be able to introduce the positional decimal notation (took 4000 years to invent!), double-entry bookkeeping, paper making, printing press.

If you know a bit of technology, then you can create water plumbing (just avoid lead), and at least some metalworking.

Nate Bargatze has a great standup routine about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5X1m16-Jvc&t=204s

Germ theory is great, for sure. For the rest, aim a bit lower to reach things you can figure out how to manufacture in your lifetime: working with steel was just starting to be properly understood in 1850s, and pre-industrial seems to be defined as 1750-1850, so depending on exact timing you could perhaps become the greatest blacksmith in existence, or a rich industrialist/inventor. As a modern person, the simplest lessons you can take back on that topic are probably "add more oxygen to the fire", and that some combinations of metals burn in very specific ways (think fireworks, burning magnesium, etc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_furnace

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer_process

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-hearth_furnace

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