Something like a digital version of Wikipedia could work out great. I could have encyclopedic knowledge of their world and future events, such as “the pope is going to name himself such and such” at the palm of my hand
Yeah, I wonder how robust an ereader and one of those solar phone chargers would be? I seem to recall English Wikipedia takes up about 5GB, so you could probably bring a good chunk of Project Gutenberg too.
Solar powered e-ink reader would work well.
Even if the battery dies you could use it in direct sunlight.
Imagine reading a book that’s still being written. Straight to the stake!
Something like a digital version of Wikipedia
?? Wikipedia IS digital.
What did you mean?
Oh, my bad. I meant offline version hahahaha
A spork, man, a spork.
Two girls at the same time, man.
I would bury a bunch of identical time capsules all over the world, each with the location of the other time capsules and a detailed timeline of increasingly terrible global events.
The later it’s dug up, the more credible it’ll be.
Depending how far back I am going, my smartphone would be sufficient. Even without any kind of connection, it can do some rad stuff that would blow the minds of anyone in the 90’s or earlier.
Charging wouldn’t be that difficult either if its pre USB-C. A nice steady 5V trickle at two visible connectors. Get yourself a nice thin copper wire with the right number of turns along a rotating magnet, and crank that handle gently
Take a photo of them. Then zoom in. If that doesn’t blow their minds, take a video of them and play it back.
Digital cameras have been commercially available as early as the late 80s, but were of course super low res and with terrible image quality even accounting for that compared to what I just carry in my pocket now.
A time machine.
That’s not a time machine, that’s a phone blue booth.
I have a recurring fantasy of visiting my favorite physics professor in the 1970s and showing him a modern smartphone. He showed me how to use integrated circuits, when microprocessors were a very new thing and we were mostly just making LEDs blink.
Came to say cell phone. Even as recently as the early 90s, no one on Earth had tech that was close. It would be plenty understandable by extrapolating current tech, but no one would believe it was a contemporary device.
Yep exactly. Many people in 1975 might have thought a smartphone was some kind of trick, but the professor I’m thinking of was very familiar with digital electronics and would know it was absolutely impossible to build such a thing at that time. I would really love to tell him all about the Internet etc. And of course when to sell his house and buy Microsoft stock lol.
Alright you primitive screw heads, listen up! You see this? This, is my boomstick! The twelve-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart’s top of the line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That’s right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Retails for about a hundred and nine, ninety five. It’s got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger. That’s right, shop smart shop, shop S-Mart. You got that?
I see Ash, I upvote.
Introducing firearms even sooner in history… What could go wrong. Surely won’t change the course of history or anything. ☺️
Being a gun nut, I’ve thought on this. Take something simple like an AR-15 back. They wouldn’t have had the metallurgy 150 years back to duplicate it. Not the barrel or bolt anyway. Springs? Certainly not the propellant. What about the precision needed for the shells alone? And forget rifling a barrel!
I’ve got a couple of 130-yo, double-barrelled shotguns. One is Damascus steel, the other is Belgian laminated steel. Sounds fancy, may rapidly disassemble with modern shot.
Bet the mechanisms and overall design would be a mind blower! Mankind, being mankind, would certainly figure a way to get some kinda better killing machine out of the deal.
LOL, this would have been a solid /r/AskHistorians question!
guns of the south by harry turtledove is based on this premise
I think a dirtbike and some gas would do it tbh
Bring a gun so I can shoot some nazis.
Nay, a nuke with the power of Fat Man in the middle of Berlin in 1933.
Sorry Germans, I know not everyone is a nazi, but hitler and the rest of the nazis gotta go 💥
Anything weaker is just gonna result in hitler escaping again
Imagine how beautiful the world would be if the nazis were eradicated before they start doing atrocities.
(Again, sorry Germans, it had to be done. Enough of you will live to tell the tale that a time traveler saved y’all from fascism)
A bag of cool ranch Doritos.
Spell-checker
Pictures of them holding a newspaper
An almanac of the time period I’ve traveled to.
I’d bring a scientist with me. Not sure which one. Just grab one with a cloth sack when they’re having breakfast with their kids, and stuff em into my time machine. They’ll figure it out.
Then I’d prod them to do future math and stuff for peasant farmers.
Then the peasant farmers either burn you both for witchcraft or shun you as the village idiot rambling about nonsense.
But… but… The Taylor Series expansions!
