200 years isn’t that long ago, but call it 2,000 years: If you go back with at least a cursory grasp of the scientific method, that might be enough to get things up and running, if not for you then for the more intelligent and scientifically-minded types around you. “Try to prove yourself wrong at every step of the process” isn’t a natural impulse for most of us, but once taught and understood, it changes the game.
You could also drop a few tantalising nuggets even if you don’t know what they mean:
E=MC2
Basic concept of evolution by natural selection
Germ theory of disease
Electromagnetism
Lenses for microscopy and telescopy, using the same lenses to start fires with the sun
Electrical conductivity of different materials (e.g. metal good, wool bad)
The basic components of a battery
Newton’s first few laws
Radio waves
Calculus
Periodic table of elements
Those are all things you can read about in any library, so you could do a crash course and memorise the broad strokes or write them down, or just take the books with you if that’s allowed.
If it were me, however, I’d just instantly kill myself.
Adding to this, Alessandro Volto invented the voltaic pile, the first true electric battery, in 1793, 233 years ago. Faraday invented the first electric motor in 1820. Neither built these entirely if their own creation, like all science they built them on the theories, discoveries, and work of those who came before. They progressed the application of all that knowledge into one new effort and are remembered because their creations took the process to the next level with inventions that reliably produced the intended outcome repeatedly.
While the average modern person couldn’t built either of those from scratch even if the knowledge is accessible to them, it’s also not like most people 200 years ago were sitting around a fire in animal skins. There’s not that big of a gap in how most people live now and lived 200 years ago compared to 50,000 years ago.
I’d say the only thing you need to get electricity started is a civilization with sufficiently ready access to copper and lodestone that they’re not luxury materials.
If you plop out in egypt or rome you can totally do it, it’ll just be a matter of convincing people to let you try.
Get some copper wire, some flat-ish bits of lodestone, and follow this: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Simple-Electric-Generator
Then you crank that soulja boy and find some way to show off the electricity, maybe just have it arc between the wire ends or make a frog leg twitch or something (assuming that doesn’t just horrify people). Or just make two of this setup and wire them to each other, so you can show that spinning one end makes the other end spin as well.
Hopefully that’ll make some people go “oh shit what if…”
200 years isn’t that long ago, but call it 2,000 years: If you go back with at least a cursory grasp of the scientific method, that might be enough to get things up and running, if not for you then for the more intelligent and scientifically-minded types around you. “Try to prove yourself wrong at every step of the process” isn’t a natural impulse for most of us, but once taught and understood, it changes the game.
You could also drop a few tantalising nuggets even if you don’t know what they mean:
Those are all things you can read about in any library, so you could do a crash course and memorise the broad strokes or write them down, or just take the books with you if that’s allowed.
If it were me, however, I’d just instantly kill myself.
Adding to this, Alessandro Volto invented the voltaic pile, the first true electric battery, in 1793, 233 years ago. Faraday invented the first electric motor in 1820. Neither built these entirely if their own creation, like all science they built them on the theories, discoveries, and work of those who came before. They progressed the application of all that knowledge into one new effort and are remembered because their creations took the process to the next level with inventions that reliably produced the intended outcome repeatedly.
While the average modern person couldn’t built either of those from scratch even if the knowledge is accessible to them, it’s also not like most people 200 years ago were sitting around a fire in animal skins. There’s not that big of a gap in how most people live now and lived 200 years ago compared to 50,000 years ago.
I’d say the only thing you need to get electricity started is a civilization with sufficiently ready access to copper and lodestone that they’re not luxury materials.
If you plop out in egypt or rome you can totally do it, it’ll just be a matter of convincing people to let you try.
Get some copper wire, some flat-ish bits of lodestone, and follow this: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Simple-Electric-Generator Then you crank that soulja boy and find some way to show off the electricity, maybe just have it arc between the wire ends or make a frog leg twitch or something (assuming that doesn’t just horrify people). Or just make two of this setup and wire them to each other, so you can show that spinning one end makes the other end spin as well.
Hopefully that’ll make some people go “oh shit what if…”