Back in Time Invetions

where is this

Sofia, Bulgaria. Here's a googled picture since I literally cannot be bothered to walk 50 meters to take one myself

>potatoes
>100AD

what the fuck is a "potaytoe" what is this pleb even saying, call the urbanae

>but the tools and materials he has to work with are so radically different that he ends up being an embarrassing failure.

He's a shit engineer then. The entire point of his job is to fix problems in creative ways given concrete limitations. Shit tools and materials just means you have to figure out new ways to use those shit tools and materials not try and force a result you're dead set on.

By this I mean that you should by all means try and figure out how to make gunpowder out of piss and charcoal and how to make gun barrels at a blacksmiths forge but before you dedicate yourself to that you should first figure out how to make adobe out of horse and sheep shit because those Icelandic sod houses suck and they'd appreciate a new building method that utilized local resources.

Which you'd know if you knew anything about Iceland's history what with being based there and all.

>tomatoes on burgers

This

Or shit, here's another one.

Figure out a way to apply precise pressure to sections of sod wall to analyze its properties, and then mathematically work out the best ratio between the base and top of a sod wall for a house. Now Icelandic houses will be sturdier and use the right amount of materials, there will be less waste and things will be more efficient. Very important on an island with scant resources.

I would simply go back in time and invent antibiotics. I'm pretty sure the Romans had the necessary level of glass working to squire some equipment to make 'em. After all penicillin is found naturally they even used it without realizing.

Another one. Icelanders love their horses.

They fucking love them. They love riding them, they love petting them, they love looking at them. Try and look at what they have for them. How far back are you? Iceland was colonized back in 874 so are Stirrups a thing? If not, invent the Stirrup. How are their harnesses? Can they be improved? How about the carriage? A highly effective suspension system for a carriage involved finding clever methods for suspending the central seating area utilizing various leather and textile lashes. Are horse blinders a thing? If not make them, they make horses much more controllable. Icelandic horses are furry, has anyone thought of making a wire brush for them? Get to it.

Srsly, your engineer sucks at his job.

Iceland is dotted in hot water springs. Can you use the steam for anything? A steam engine and thus electricity is out of the question, too complicated, but how about you use the heat to have a home industry of pasteurized sheep milk? Use it to keep milk and other liquids fresher, longer.

yes, that's what 21st century military engineers do all the time, they make gunpowder from piss and charcoal at the local blacksmith, they teach them that in school, he was just not as smart as you, if you were sent back in time you would make rockets from wood and sheeps bladder

>Use it to keep milk and other liquids fresher, longer.

Why this is important:

Your rinky dink village can now dependably export its sheeps milk around the whole island, even during the summer when the temperature rises and you can't just freeze everything.

As far as I know the Icelanders were never too big on fires, not much wood on the island and what they did have was used for housing. IIRC what they did when it was cold as balls (as it often is in a place called Iceland) was just stick their animals inside and use body heat+thick as fuck sod walls to heat their homes up. So it might have never occurred to them to go the Mongolian route and just compress their horses shit into fuel pellets and burn that, this also works for Chicken shit.

No quite the contrary, In fact you're completely missing the point you dumbass. Then again what can I expect from a faggy contrarian user whose reading comprehension got him to the blacksmith being the site where gunpowder creation would happen.

Again, your engineer is shit and you should feel like shit.

>they teach them that in school
What they teach engineers in school is problem solving. Whole lots of problem solving. In fact the first two years are basically nothing but math problems. If your engineer can't figure out a way to improve the lives of the people there with the shit tools he was given, then he is in fact by definition a bad engineer.

Sorry.

>faggy contrarian
wow projecting much?

>Again, your engineer is shit and you should feel like shit.
yes yes, as they say, everyone is a general after the battle

im sure you would invent lazers and rocketry with medieval technology, i bet you're a student or NEET with absolutely no idea what an engineer actually does

oh wow, really? are you an engineer? whose lives did you improve? let me guess you helped your mom redesign her kitchen

There's also a trick to using poop as a fuel source. It has to be dry before being compressed. Really dry. You can use an oven to do this.

I actually studied 1 1/2 years of aeronautical engineering, hated it and got right the fuck out of STEM.

But by all means faggot, tell me where I'm wrong, the part where I'm saying DON'T try to do:
>invent lazers and rocketry with medieval technology
This shit you're very stupidly trying to pawn as my viewpoint or the part where I say engineers solve problems as sort of a baseline definition.

you're an idiot

Hate to break it to you OP but potatoes didn't exist in Europe until 1567.

Ouch user, I'm devastated.

>be me
>be OP
>go back to ancient Rome to become an inventor
>one evening after my nightly shift in the local boipussy brothel it comes to me
>I'LL INVENT FRENCH FRIES
>already know how to fry shit, just need to invent the right oil
>spend better part of my life trying to come up with the right recipe for the oil
>20 years and a stretched anus later, I have it!
>realize that potatoes haven't been discovered yet
>"I know! I'll set sail and discover the new world!"
>I set about gathering funds
>go to the forum daily to beg people to help me discover potatoes, I tell them about how wonderful it would be to have an abundance of potatoes
>actually meet a beautiful woman down by the forum one day
>9/10, solid ass.marble
>take her to my hovel and we have a one night stand
>feelsgoodman.mosaic
>9 months later, she shows up at my door
>apparently I had fatheres octuplets
>bythefuckingemperor
>and they're all severely autistic
>fucking great
>a failed inventor, I devote my life to caring for these 8 burdens on society
>die from STDs from having only my butthole as a source of income
>mfw I realize on my deathbed that I never got my potatoes because of those 8 goddamn potatoes
>pic related

Well he wanted potatoes

...

I always think about this too and honestly and I decided I will invent guns for the Umayyad Empire and let them do whatever they want with them

Also tell them about the Americas\Australia

what would be the simplest inventions or ideas that would require the least resources and benefit ancient people most?

I imagined a story when I was younger.

basically I go to ancient alexandria, and try to build a printing press, and "inventing" a codex form of book

I picture myself then getting lynched by pissed off scribes.

Or: I try to invent a sturrup and instead end up hurting a horse pretty badly due to the saddle not being big enough to support sturrups. (as in not spreading out weight enough).

The Romans had lathes, they could have made guns (muskets at the very least).

and how are you supposed to convey this idea in a land where you have no idea about it's culture and customs? you run around preaching about how great your stuff is and people just get suspicious of you.

Germ theory of disease. You could save literally billions, requires no technology at all that they didn't already have.

You don' need stem vents to pasturise milk, in fact you couldn't use a steam vent since you need to carefully control the temperature. Besides, they already had an excellent method for preserving milk, it's called "cheese".

the romans lacked many things though. They didn't use windmills for instance, they didn't have sails that could turn against the wind, they also lacked centerline rudders (and used drag-inducing sidemounted oars instead.

at most with regards to gunpowder you'd be able to make the chinese/mongol fire-lance

(basically the gun's earliest ancestor, it's essentially a model rocket motor at the end of a stick, it acts a little like a flame-thrower)

I guess they began to evolve into guns as people started packing rocks and pebbles into the end as they realized that debris would be thrown out when the powder ignited.

Really "back in time"-type scenarios depend on the circumstances of being sent back in time.

like if it was something that would happen without warning right this moment, I'd be fucked, if I was given time to prepare, or a selection/ability to take things back with me and choose the end location+time I'd be less fucked. I could get all the vaccinations, go to the doctor and get my health checked so I wouldn't have suprises, wean myself off aderall and prozac, work out, read/memorize history, engineering, and science books, and learn languages.

Ideally I'd be sent back in time by either future-time travelers or aliens who would be so kind as to give me a nanobot implant that helps prevent disease(viral, bacterial, etc.) or tooth decay/etc, healing injury faster and possibly practical immortality (in the sense you live forever as long as you've got food, air, water, and aren't physically harmed) or regowing limbs,along with this some kind of "universal translator" implant, (all these implants running off of some kind of technomagic internal battery or using some kind of power drawn from the bloodstream (either blood-pressure or blood-glucose). and (once again, pure utter fantasy, and an idealistic one) a portable hole+bag-of-holding.

The Romans could make steel and had lathes, that's literally all you need to make useful muskets. Gunpowder is fairly easy to make once you know how, certainly the Romans had plenty of the raw materials (primarily sulphur from mines in Spain).

>muh magic nanobots

Yes obviously if you have magic and took that back in time, that would be useful for the savages. OP wasn't asking about that, tho.

Lmao found the Jap

It's just an idea user. If it doesn't pan out it doesn't pan out, the whole point is that the one anons book's engineer was a shit engineer for trying revolutionize things and over reaching instead of trying to improve immediately identifiable problems.

You're right, but my idea was to use the already hot water as a source of heat to save on fuel since less energy would be needed to bring it to the proper temperature and use that increased fuel efficiency in a small business.

They burned peat, of which Iceland has a great abundance. Really the thing holding Iceland back is the fact that it's a terrible shithole, you'd be better off catching a ride to Europe and using your technical knowledge where it can do some real good.

you'd also have to remember the societal aspect of ancient life as well. Its not like you can just go into a metal shop and use their tools in the modern day, imagine what it would be like in ancient rome. You would have to get money and earn the trust of the blacksmith without being seen as suspicious or crazy. In order to do this you'd probably have to apprentice under the blacksmith for a few years or earn enough to get your own tools and shop, then you can build a gun and hope no one assasinates you and steals the invention.

You mean Orthodox?

One place I'd like to go is either the US or Britain at the end of the 19th century, though I imagine the big hassle would be a lack of any documents or family-members in either place which could lead to problems if these things were being asked of me/my background was being checked...

mostly because I want to design a SMG or something for the allies just in time for ww1, I think it would be marketed as a carbine for either cavalry or for inspection/boarding-parties/ship-security in a navy.

or convince the British to just go with a rimless version of the .303 so they'd have minimal changes to make on their rifles
or Convince the french to just adopt a replacement for the lebel cartridge, and then adopt a 5+ shot berthier rifle in that cartridge as a valid intrim for their mainline

Though the whole non-decimal currency, the likely worthlessness of my own currency, and/or the risk of getting something like TB or dying from poisoning due to lax consumer safety/regulation would be somewhat nerve wracking, along with offending people with my 21st century americanisms.

didn't mean to reply to though roman steel was pretty poor in terms of quality, I don't think the romans really understood it's manufacture as well as medieval smiths did. I mean just look at roman armor, it's either less complex or on the same level as early medieval mail

>Really the thing holding Iceland back is the fact that it's a terrible shithole
If you could properly harness geothermal energy the place could kickstart the industrial revolution.

I know how to make paper out of linen rags and have actually made it before using mundane items.

How rich will i get?

WHY don't you try reading the story. You can find it for free online.

> tfw you will never defend a small scandinavian village from sea raiders using your minigun and then give them some helpful modern tools from your time portal-equipped minivan before you leave

>go to the court of random king
>accurately predict big event in the future
>earn the king's trust as a prophet
>lead the king into doing increasingly stupid/funny shit by claiming that it's necessary to stop some great tragedy from destroying his kingdom
>eventually end up losing his trust and getting executed
Sounds like a grand old time to be honest

I'd do this if I knew for a fact that it'd be recorded down and preserved for people thousands of years from now to kek at

>thanks for destroying our rags to make weird pointless sheets of trash, stranger!
>I'll pay for your weregild when I kill you, scum

>accelerated development of the atomic bomb by 800AD to preemptively nuke the g*rmans

>accelerated development of the atomic bomb in Pangea to preemptively nuke the w*rld

>He actually fell for the """engineering judgment""" meme
Colleges train students for JOBS, full stop.

>accelerated development of the atomic bomb to 15 A.D. so Germanicus can nuke the g*rmans

>sheets of trash
>excessively cheaper than parchment
>much more durable and available than papyrus
>can be made out of any old rags
You're right user, paper is trash.

And that's precisely what made it a world changing invention.

Just throwing out a piece of parchment or scribbling a quick meaningless memo on some papyrus would have been unthinkable to most commoners. Paper very much revolutionized information transfer precisely because it was disposable.

i loled. and honestly OP wtf, his/ board, and you dont even know there were no potatoes, tomatoes etc in europe before columbian times

>implying that the romans knew what germs were in the first place

Be OP
Apear in rome, speak no ancient latin, people think i am crazy start asking for POTATOES get trown into the arena to be killed for public disrupt.

Roman put bread on wounds and bandaged It so it can get moldy.

you mean Rasputin?

People who invent a process don't make any money out of it. The man who built the paper mill using your directions is the one who would get rich.

Cottage industry for paper would actually be pretty easy if I could find a patron.