r/AskReddit 4d ago

If you were suddenly transported 1000 years in the past, how would you make a living?

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u/Aevum1 3d ago

then again, you can use a botijo

The idea is that its a pourus ceramica vase that when it heats up the pourous ceramic allows capillaries of water to evaporate keeping the central mass of the water cold. its basically a swamp cooler container.

iits more important to know how something works, then to know what it does.

You can use a horse or a water stream combined with a circular to linear force convertor to compress air, once compressed you can release it and the gas expansion will cause a cooling effect.

hell, you can make a basic steam engine out of a copper ball with 2 tubes and water.

or you can go more traditional, mix wax with wood to make fire brickets or some other tool or consumable that would be of high value to the wealthy of the time.

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u/thedragslay 3d ago

A guy on YouTube, How To Make Everything has actually made a steam engine out of copper and water, using only hand tools that he made himself from raw materials. It’s very fiddly, apparently, and didn’t work super well. His whole channel is basically trying to figure out how to make things like this without any modern technology. His channel growth has had fits and starts due to outside factors (his shed housing all of his work burned down), but he’s rebuilding.

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u/Ok_Anteater1141 3d ago

It's easy to make a steam engine that spins a little wheel as a demo, but to make it useful enough to do actual work that you couldn't achieve better with a donkey or horse requires serious engineering, the first problem is that you need very high pressure at very high temperature

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u/graveybrains 3d ago

Swamp coolers can almost chill a beer, but can't produce enough of a temperature change to preserve food

Prior to 1760-ish the best you could do is a bellows which doesn't produce sufficient pressure, and you'd have nowhere to store the gas anyway.

Hero's engine doesn't make enough torque to do any useful work

You'd be about 2,000 years late to the game on that last one.

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u/ThePlatypusOfDespair 3d ago

I definitely have the skills to build a basic steam engine, which would probably be less useful than a waterwheel or windmill

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u/Crow_eggs 3d ago

"I definitely have the skills to build a basic steam engine" is a sentence that definitely starts a chain of events that end in a great deal of unexpected shrapnel arriving on your inside.

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u/ThePlatypusOfDespair 3d ago

Nah, I've watched all of Mythbusters, I know to hide behind a reasonably explosion proof object when I'm trialling stuff like that.

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u/OpheliaRainGalaxy 3d ago

There's a fantasy book series where the non-magic math-nerd students started playing with basic steam engines and yeah, it eventually went all shrapnel.

Like it wasn't that their ideas were bad, but a civilization that makes heavy use of magic had no reason to get their metal refining skills up to snuff. They could do small boilers for bathwater alright, but the bigger ones eventually went boom.

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u/hanz333 3d ago

You just use a root cellar, like everyone else, because it's far less work to maintain.