A lot of this I couldn't do but... a lot of it I probably could. I've designed and built quite a few weird machines for people who were paying me, but probably the simplest thing for me to make in preindustrial times would be a battery and an electric motor.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Congratulations, you’ve just earned a stoning by the town mob.

Unless you can make an electric motor that goes with your electric generator, you’ll just be killed as a witch for making a device that hurts people with invisible energy.

Also, good luck not just getting brutally murdered for being a weird person that doesn’t speak the language and is dressed funny. For like half of human history, even describing a magnet would be nearly impossible, let alone finding enough magnets of similar size and strength, and having enough money to purchase those rare items and thinly drawn copper.

If a guy came up to you today, dressed funny and talking in broken Spanglish or something asked you for a small loan so he could buy some deuterium and promethium to make a fusion-tap-quark drive so he can advance humanity, you’d probably run away. A thousand years ago you’d probably just have been stabbed on general principles.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

A motor and a generator are essentially the same thing just the direction of electricity determines whether they turn mechanical to physical energy or the reverse. Making two generators is equal to two motors or 1 of each depending on installation.