Alright you primitive screw heads, listen up! You see this? This, is my boomstick! The twelve-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart’s top of the line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That’s right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Retails for about a hundred and nine, ninety five. It’s got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger. That’s right, shop smart shop, S-Mart. You got that?
Introducing firearms even sooner in history… What could go wrong. Surely won’t change the course of history or anything. ☺️
Being a gun nut, I’ve thought on this. Take something simple like an AR-15 back. They wouldn’t have had the metallurgy 150 years back to duplicate it. Not the barrel or bolt anyway. Springs? Certainly not the propellant. What about the precision needed for the shells alone? And forget rifling a barrel!
I’ve got a couple of 130-yo, double-barrelled shotguns. One is Damascus steel, the other is Belgian laminated steel. Sounds fancy, may rapidly disassemble with modern shot.
Bet the mechanisms and overall design would be a mind blower! Mankind, being mankind, would certainly figure a way to get some kinda better killing machine out of the deal.
LOL, this would have been a solid /r/AskHistorians question!
guns of the south by harry turtledove is based on this premise
How far back are we talking?
I mean the 90s were about 30 years ago (sorry for making you feel old).
So let’s say that that I managed to find a way to travel in time, and had time to prepare for a trip to 95…
I will also assume that it is a paradox self correcting time travel deal.
I’d bring an iPhone with me, that should convince anyone that I am from the future.
Depending how far back I am going, my smartphone would be sufficient. Even without any kind of connection, it can do some rad stuff that would blow the minds of anyone in the 90’s or earlier.
Take a photo of them. Then zoom in. If that doesn’t blow their minds, take a video of them and play it back.
Digital cameras have been commercially available as early as the late 80s, but were of course super low res and with terrible image quality even accounting for that compared to what I just carry in my pocket now.
I have a recurring fantasy of visiting my favorite physics professor in the 1970s and showing him a modern smartphone. He showed me how to use integrated circuits, when microprocessors were a very new thing and we were mostly just making LEDs blink.
Something like a digital version of Wikipedia could work out great. I could have encyclopedic knowledge of their world and future events, such as “the pope is going to name himself such and such” at the palm of my hand
Yeah, I wonder how robust an ereader and one of those solar phone chargers would be? I seem to recall English Wikipedia takes up about 5GB, so you could probably bring a good chunk of Project Gutenberg too.
Solar powered e-ink reader would work well.
Even if the battery dies you could use it in direct sunlight.
Something like a digital version of Wikipedia
?? Wikipedia IS digital.
What did you mean?
Oh, my bad. I meant offline version hahahaha
