Telling them how a steam engine works.
That would start the industrial revolution earlier and it would end up speeding us up to a more advanced and better future… or to an early extinction by global warming… hmmmm
Maybe explaining an electricity generator would be a better gamble, but it may be very hard to make one back then…
AFAIK even that wouldn’t have been unsolvable problems for Greeks and Romans.
However why put all the effort into this machinery when you can simply put more slaves to work? One driving factor for the Industrial Revolution was the issue of having to pay people actual wages instead of being able to force them to work. This added incentives to reduce manual labor and replace them with something owners can force to work without paying it: Machines.
Telling them how a steam engine works. That would start the industrial revolution earlier and it would end up speeding us up to a more advanced and better future… or to an early extinction by global warming… hmmmm
Maybe explaining an electricity generator would be a better gamble, but it may be very hard to make one back then…
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AFAIK even that wouldn’t have been unsolvable problems for Greeks and Romans.
However why put all the effort into this machinery when you can simply put more slaves to work? One driving factor for the Industrial Revolution was the issue of having to pay people actual wages instead of being able to force them to work. This added incentives to reduce manual labor and replace them with something owners can force to work without paying it: Machines.