• @CADmonkey
    link
    381 year ago

    Let’s see… electricity in a preindustrial environment. You’ll get into Factorio levels of invent a tool to make a tool to make a tool…

    Copper wire existed at the time, (depending on the time period) but drawing it involved a person on a swing pulling it through a hole in a metal plate. So we need a metal plate. Surely there is a town blacksmith? We will need a few plates with gradually decreasing hole diameter. Enough wire for a demonstration would be difficult and expensive, but not impossible. Could also use copper busbars instead of wire.

    Now that we have conductors, we have to figure out what method of generation we want. Rather than trying to make bearings, balanced shafts, and stacks of thin metal plates all identical and radially symmetrical so we can make a generator, we should first attempt a battery. For this we can get away with stacks of two dissimilar metals in a glass or ceramic jar, bathed in some sulfuric acid. Aqua Regia was a mixture of nitric acid and sulfuric acid, but it might dissolve copper and zinc plates. Could also use lead plates, those are easier to hammer out flat. With this we could get an output around 2v per cell, put a half dozen of them together in series and one could build a simple arc lamp.

    After the proof of concept demonstration, hopefully you’d interest more smiths in the project, increasing your talent pool. With some mercury and wire you could build a version of Faraday’s homopolar motor.

    After that I’d probably be burned at the stake.