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Electricity is easy to make though... a couple magnets and some copper wire.
Easy materials to get from your local 1st century hardware store
they'd probably have non-shitty copper by then, but magnets? thems witchcraft
And don't forget that you need to demonstrate that it's producing a current. Just get a light bulb, right??
probably go with a hand-crank zapper or something. it's tricky to do much without resistors and capacitors.
Zap the royalty to prove your point and get flayed and executed for it
If you can make a generator you can make a motor, just connect them together and have one move when you spin the other
The could do the same with a belt, go away with your flash nonsense youngling
Plating a metal object with a different metal would probably be the simplest, impressive thing. Or just heating a thin wire?
Depends on if Ea-nasir was still in business.
Most people dont even know how to make wires.
really? isnt it just forcing/extruding hot metal through a die?
How would you buy copper with no money? It’s not like you can exchange your modern money to their currency. So first you need to find a job and any good paying job is probably protected by guilds and you don’t even speak their language so good luck finding a mentor who will offer an apprenticeship. You will be a peasant. Nothing more than a subsistence farmer who has to rent the land and give half his yield to the local lord. Hunting? Killing anything bigger than a fowl will get you in trouble since big game is property of the lord.
Also copper ore doesn’t lie freely on the ground. You need to mine for that shit and be lucky that there is a source in the vicinity, since you can’t travel very far. Can’t buy a horse with no money.
And if you found a source you need to convince an entire community to help you mine for copper. You sure as hell can’t do it alone. Good luck convincing them when everyone is busy tending their crops to prepare for the winter. And you don’t even speak their language.
I imagine that the best way to make money would be if you manage to build a rm rudimentary still.
I feel like moonshine would be relatively easy to do and a great way to make profit of no one kills you before.
Distilled alcohol is quite rudimentary to produce but only appeared late in history. Plus it is great for leisure application, food conservation or medicine.
How do you get the materials for a still with no money?
Surely you've got a pot or something to cook your food in, right? Stick a leaf or a hollow log over it or whatever. Seriously… Money is fake, and literally everything is materials.
Sorry... how is a leaf over a pot the same as a still?
It's a condensation surface on which vapours revert to droplets in a liquid state due to the colder ambient air-cooled temperature of the leaf compared to the gaseous medium and heat source below it (and therefore lower vapour pressure immediately next to its surface), allowing the condensate/distillate to be collected and funneled for disposal, recycling, consumption, and/or another stage of distillation, and, in this case, producing an increasingly concentrated azeotropic water-ethanol solution which you can sell for the big bucks.
…Slightly simplified, of course. You may in fact need multiple leaves over pots, or even a couple leaves bent into funnels/chutes, and possibly even one pot over another pot.
I.E., By definition, a leaf over a pot is a still, as long as you put it at a slight angle and leave a small hole at the edge so the distillate can be collected. — Again: Physics provides, money is mostly an illusion/labour optimization mechanism, and sheet metal might be convenient for this use case but literally everything is materials. … If your only thought on how to produce a technology yourself is "Who can I pay for this?", then, yeah, you're not thinking in the right lines to get there.
On another note, I like your username though. Did you know they do like pump jet lifting body action stuff in the air? Really cool.
There's always the world's oldest profession...
i guess that if we're going to go the fantasy route, then I'd just steal everything I needed - the strong do as they please and the weak submit, after all. violence is the only language I'd need to speak
Good luck convincing them when everyone is busy tending their crops to prepare for the winter.
Just sprinkle some bird poop or bat guano or whatever other nitrogen and phosphorus-rich gunk onto it
when they aren't looking.
How do you make the die?
1st century? probably with diamonds.
Big-ass piece of cast iron with a little hole in it.
If you can convince them you know the end product I'm sure the king can point you to his metal workers and in a lot of cases come up with a solution.
Also, it's labor intensive but I think you can beat it into wire or use some other methods.
If the king says to the blacksmith "make that copper long ans skinny" he can probably make it happen.
What tools do you use to precisely work cast iron into a small hole to create your die?
Don't forget it'll need to be covered with an insulator, else your coils would short circuit and not producing any current. So you'll need some chemistry to produce insulator thin enough to create your generator.
It is, but the ancient method is tedious as fuck. It was basically just pulling a piece through dozen of gradually smaller holes, by hand. I dont think you could do one pass extrusion without all of the precision machinery needed to manufacture such machine. But I aint a blacksmith, I just saw the process in some documentary a while ago.
No :)
Probably easier to use a lemon and copper plates. Not sure what you'd connect to it though
Use it for electroplating/etching, that's cool as shit
lodestones lol, people have known about those for aaaaaaaaaages
Copper wire: yes. Magnets, get lodestones
You can literally mine lodestone and copper. Ancient people have mined those two things since antiquity. Where do you think it comes from now? Fairies?
Just waltz into the nearest copper mine you happen to have teleported next to and scream like a mad man you need to make one of those rocks into a wire somehow and hope they don't skin you alive (they also don't understand English and you only know how to conjugate the verb to be in Latin because you slept during all your classes thinking you'd never need Latin - they speak Aramaic anyway but who can tell the difference, it just old sounding words).
Bring a live translation device, and program it with whatever the expected language is. That alone would be magic to them. And you don;t need to go to a copper mine, there were markets for processed copper. Pulling it into wire is just a case of roughly forming it into a cylinder, then pulling that cylinder through successively smaller holes. A local smith could help you with that.
And then hope they don't kill you for being a witch.
You literally could just go dig some yourself while they're away and procure it that way.
What do you think copper ore looks like? What tools would you use?
Ancient mining was a punishment, generally a death sentence. It's hard work often overseen by a slave master.
Copper ore isn't concentrated copper either a lot of ore goes into a little copper. There's a reason only the really wealthy had copper items.
It's amazing what some people here think would be such a simple task in the ancient world.
Well, in this scenario we'd presumably have our electronic devices with us anyway, so it's honestly a moot point.
Mfs always had some of those around in 330 BC. Couldn't walk anywhere without running into a fucking copper wire or a magnet.
You can induce voltage on more than just copper you know. Or maybe you don't know. You probably don't know.
Ever wonder why it goes bronze age and then iron age? It's because it's a minor miracle humanity discovered how to smelt iron. Iron requires temperatures higher than you can achieve with just wood. Iron absorbs carbon and sulfur making it worthless (in the wrong mixtures).
The process is complex and resource intensive.
Assuming a bronze age civilization, copper or tin is the best you can hope for. Finding a magnet is going to be difficult because there's not really ferromagnetic materials available. In the modern era the most common material is iron.
That's great but we were talking about copper and magnets.
Magnets, how do they work?