• @[email protected]
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    fedilink
    311 year ago

    Yeah, even electricity is easy to explain. You just rotate a high quality magnet within a coil of thin high quality copper wire. Easy.

    Problems are:

    • How do you make a high quality magnet?
    • How do you purify copper fine enough?
    • How do you make a spool of the copper wire?
    • How do you make the bearings for the shaft?
    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      61 year ago

      Nah, problems arise much earlier. Metals are expensive (proper steel is a thing of the 1700s, try getting proper coke) and your claims might be considered too outlandish for funding of home industrialisation, even making the needed tools might take ages.

      Depending on when you are, science might even be considered evil, useless, unless you have very clear, direct and easy use cases (e.g. horse collar, compass, wheelbarrow).

      Interesting could be the printing press for problem solving.

      Proving electricity is easy, since even static electricity is relatively unexplained for a long time. You already know that metals are great conductors, hell, even what conductance roughly is. You know lead acid batteries. Simple conceptual motor and lead acid batteries together with printing press is probably enough to industrialise many societies early.

      Don’t know to get acid though.

    • @linearchaos
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      English
      41 year ago

      Efficiency would certainly be pretty rough but wire’s been around since about 2,800 BC. Copper would be the way to go if you could manage it but any conductive metal would get the job done to some extent.

      Finding a reasonable safe insulator might be a little bit of a chore.

      Soft metal bushings have also been around for a really long time.

      Efficiency on magnets would be difficult, You might want to just use a really huge battery pile and electromagnets.

      The manufacturing tolerances for the axle the wire and everything would be a fight.

      I don’t think you have a chance in hell of producing anything in the same efficiency range is what we have today, but compared to not having electricity at all… It might be worthwhile.

      The thing is even if you make the electricity what the hell are you going to use it for? For light bulbs are going to need glass blowing in inert gases. You’re going to need diodes resistors capacitors and transistors to do radio, You could probably usher in tubes but that shi*'s almost black magic as it is.

    • @cogman
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      11 year ago

      Copper is the easy part. Get it hot enough and you’ll end up with high quality copper… Sourcing the copper is much more difficult.

      Finding magnets is somewhat simple, you just need some iron… That’s a lot more difficult. Iron smelting is way harder than copper smelting (especially without electricity).

      Making bearings is also difficult. It requires not only iron smelting but also high precision machining.