this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2025
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Anti Meme
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Baby steps. The ancients were familiar with static electricity. Rub a cat with an amber rod. Show them the spark and explain it's the same thing as lightning, except a billion times smaller.
They were making batteries in clay jars in Baghdad. Make a simple battery. Not sure where to go from there. The light bulb is the killer app though.
Baghdad battery is pseudoarcheology with no actual basis in reality.
Batteries are apparently quite easy to make, though, as long as you have sulfuric acid. It's been a known substance since antiquity so you could probably get or produce some. They obviously wouldn't have called it sulfuric acid though
Proper electrochemistry would have also been really easy too, just shove 2 different metals into a box of water with a bit of electrolytes and you've got yourself a battery. Not sure if you'd be able to produce enough voltage to do any meaningful work though. Maybe if you hook up a bunch in series
Realistically, I think the limitations of modern technology functioning in the past is not really the knowledge of that technology, but the lack of infrastructure. You can't make a computer even if you knew how to because the manufacturing infrastructure and supply chains required to build a computer simply doesn't exist
Yeah, I was just thinking about a simple wind or solar turbine would need an alternator of some kind and I wouldn't know how to make that.
I'd love to see how a reasonably reliable bicycle made from avaible materials could have changed things
Oh and I bet the romans would love some stuff like a trompe pump