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, S-Mart. You got that?
this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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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 see Ash, I upvote.
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.
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.
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
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.
Assuming we're going back far enough, antibiotics. Cure one person of the bubonic plague or tuberculosis and people will start taking you seriously.
Burn the witch!!!
Often wondered how much mileage one could get out of moldy bread. This looks promising, haven't read it all.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ubrekq/before_flemings_accidental_discovery_of/
A time machine.
That's not a time machine, that's a phone blue booth.
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
Something like a digital version of Wikipedia
?? Wikipedia IS digital.
What did you mean?
Oh, my bad. I meant offline version hahahaha
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!
How far back are we talking?
I mean the 90s were about 30 years ago (sorry for making you feel old).
So let's say that that I managed to find a way to travel in time, and had time to prepare for a trip to 95...
I will also assume that it is a paradox self correcting time travel deal.
I'd bring an iPhone with me, that should convince anyone that I am from the future.
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.
A fixed gear bicycle with wide, flat-resistant tires and a belt drive. Plus a hand pump, a set of tools and a box full of inner tubes.
That should be enough to keep it running for a lifetime, offers actual utility, and it's understandable enough what it does so I'm hopefully not burnt at the stake, and people can build their own with what they have.
I would bring a list of supernovas that occured in my past, but in the future of the time I traveled to. A couple matching observations will provide indisputable proof that I have information from the future.
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Generator. Television. PS2. Cowboy Bebop on DVD.
Idk if it would work at all, but TANK is such a good fucking song, and I hope they enjoy at least that much before burning me for witchcraft.
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!
A spork, man, a spork.
Spell-checker
Why would I want to prove that it is real. I'd go full Connecticut Yankee and build a modern empire with me at the head.
I'd want something that can help people and can be tested and has an immediate, dramatic effect to make it undeniable
Maybe insulin? You could literally bring comatose people back from the brink of death in minutes
Wouldn't anyone needing insulin already be dead? Or is there a middle ground where a diabetic can go in and out of shock, yet survive without?
They would survive for awhile after diagnosis on a starvation diet, maybe weeks, and slipping in and out of a coma but it was a death sentence. There's stories from the 1920's when whole wards of kids were hit with a first dose that removed the symptoms in minutes. I can't imagine being in that room when all that despair and anguish turned into hope and relief.
An almanac of the time period I’ve traveled to.
One lower case "r", and no ragrets.
Hey. I got lots of good responses without doing anything. Don't want to jinx it.
"Behold! my field of ragrets! Lay thine eyes upon it and see that it is fallow!"
I'm just impressed you know what i mean. I appove.
A list of everything the church has ever had to walk back(they classified capybaras as fish), along with the scientific proof. And a thousand doses of Keflex.
Bring the Keflex to save your own ass, if nothing else.
Two girls at the same time, man.
A fistfull of random coins of varying ages.
A bag of cool ranch Doritos.
I think a dirtbike and some gas would do it tbh
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