Asklemmy

But also still castles. It's true, people might divide them up now, but I'm not sure how uniformly or accurately.

You gave events over two centuries as an example, but if I was dividing the world up by associations, DEIC goes in with Shakespeare and Columbus, but Le Mis goes in with beam steam engines and sawtooth-roof factories in a later era. That's just me though, obviously it changed continuously in reality.

I guess what I'm asking is, how would medieval be different when it comes to this question? They're still going to understand trade and politics fine, but not most things machine or industry-related.

Edit: Even if I was explaining stuff to a guy like Ea-Nasir from the deep bronze age, I'd mainly have to adjust for metal being less common in their era. A lot of everyday life would be familiar to people from 1700AD.

Yeah, but we're in 1700, as in a year after 1699. They had the word "electricity", and it referred to the tendency of feathers to stick to stuff. The first static electricity generator is recorded in 1705. Thomas Savery's practical steam engine was patented in 1698, but probably wasn't being used in actual mines as of 1700. The first impractical ones were recorded in classical antiquity, however. All the experiments and applications you're thinking of were from much later that century.

That's actually kind of a nitpick, though. They have a chance to know more than a person from 1500AD, 1200AD, or 1700BC. The point is that all of them still know basically nothing. You're not going to gain good analogies and comparisons until deep into industrialisation, and even then some things like computers will be tricky. Late life Ben Franklin would be somewhere in between, but it's my personal guess him being Ben Franklin would be more helpful than his prior knowledge of the concept of conservation of mass.