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sebzilla posted:The compass and other navigational advances? Improved ploughs?
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Jan 5, 2017 16:02
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Magnets.
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Jan 5, 2017 16:10
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The printing press is probably the one big invention you could easily transfer via time travel since it's so conceptual. All you need is half-decent metallurgy, ink and hinges. Also I think a lot of the medieval refinements on mill and wheel-based technology could be adopted pretty easily. And related to that, paper and its mass production! None of this is a huge jump or anything, but hey, it's something.
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Jan 5, 2017 16:28
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Roman printing press would mean a greater likelihood of a copy of Lives of Famous Whores surviving so it's the best choice.
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Jan 5, 2017 16:36
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Guildencrantz posted:The printing press is probably the one big invention you could easily transfer via time travel since it's so conceptual. All you need is half-decent metallurgy, ink and hinges. The metallurgy isn't that basic. It has to be unbelievably consistent to make the moveable type which allows the Gutenberg-era industrial scale of printing. There's a reason that the Romans had both stamps and (I think) screw presses but no printing press. You also need paper because vellum/parchment are too expensive for the basic drudge work that makes a press worthwhile, and papyrus is poo poo. I'd say that something like germ theory and vaccination is more easily transferable on that "conceptual" level than the printing press.
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Jan 5, 2017 16:37
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CommonShore posted:The metallurgy isn't that basic. It has to be unbelievably consistent to make the moveable type which allows the Gutenberg-era industrial scale of printing. There's a reason that the Romans had both stamps and (I think) screw presses but no printing press. You also need paper because vellum/parchment are too expensive for the basic drudge work that makes a press worthwhile, and papyrus is poo poo. Alright, I'll concede that. What about at least woodblock printing though? It's not amazing but still a step above handwriting. Were the Romans missing anything required to make a basic paper mill if you gave them the blueprint?
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Jan 5, 2017 17:29
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Question I have been thinking about since playing Witcher 3 (yea yea I know..) What was Roman housing like for common people. I can find all sorts of information online for wealthier Romans, and it comes up often in movies/shows, but I am seeing shockingly little on how your average Roman "peasant" lived. Were most poor Roman villages constructed in a similar fashion to early-medieval Europe, such as straw/wood huts? It's been bugging me recently that when I think "Roman living" I think clean streets, large homes, and running water and, fast-forward a few hundred years, when I think "Early Medieval" living I think "Village from Witcher 3". Anyone got more information or where I can find more information on Roman peasants may have lived, maybe in comparison to their early-medieval period brethren?
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Jan 5, 2017 17:38
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Check youtube for some Mary Beard videos
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Jan 5, 2017 18:03
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Guildencrantz posted:Alright, I'll concede that. What about at least woodblock printing though? It's not amazing but still a step above handwriting. I think that the Romans actually did do woodblock printing - stamps and seals and such. Maybe not mechanically. I can't tell you how far off the Romans were from doing paper. What was their linen production like? What kind of textile culture were they? If they were using lots of linen and cotton, it's actually conceivable that they could have pulled off paper quite easily, provided that there was enough around to produce a scrap surplus. But if they were a wool-heavy culture, with stuff like linen and cotton only being available to the very rich, then it's probable that they'd look at paper as a novelty and shrug. e. I'm reading the history of paper article on wikipedia right now and there's quite a bit of stuff required for mass-scale paper production that the Romans didn't have, notably the trip hammer. They could have done hand-made paper, but that's no better than parchment cost-wise. CommonShore fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Jan 5, 2017 |
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Jan 5, 2017 18:07
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sebzilla posted:The compass and other navigational advances? I don't think electricity is a valid one, that'd require you set up an electrical grid. And potatoes would require trans-Atlantic travel. Compasses are a pretty fantastic one and relatively easy to do.
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Jan 5, 2017 19:14
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Are you implying the romans didn't have trans Atlantic travel???
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Jan 5, 2017 19:14
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Solaris 2.0 posted:Question I have been thinking about since playing Witcher 3 (yea yea I know..) In the city of Rome itself, poor Romans lived in these horrible makeshift apartment complexes called insulae (islands). They were shoddily-made and prone to disastrous collapse or fire.
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Jan 5, 2017 19:20
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A common slumlord tactic in Rome would be to buy buildings as they were on fire, as well as the buildings neighboring it that were at risk of burning down, then building your own poo poo over the rubble afterwards. A literal fire sale. Crassus made part of his fortune doing stuff like this. edit: I wanted to clarify in case it wasn't obvious: they would buy the building and the ones neighboring it at huge bargains, because they were on fire Jamwad Hilder fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Jan 5, 2017 |
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Jan 5, 2017 19:30
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I have a historiography question which might belong here or in the Medieval History thread- Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain includes several purported kings who are supposed to have ruled during Roman times. Did Geoffrey think that Britain wasn't conquered, or that these kings all sort of paid lip service to Roman suzerainty, or what? Is there a historical basis for any of these Roman-era British kings, apart from maybe conflating some Roman governor or usurper with a native Briton somehow?
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Jan 5, 2017 19:47
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Jamwad Hilder posted:A common slumlord tactic in Rome would be to buy buildings as they were on fire, as well as the buildings neighboring it that were at risk of burning down, then building your own poo poo over the rubble afterwards. A literal fire sale. Crassus made part of his fortune doing stuff like this. He also had squads of slaves trained in fire-fighting standing by, springing into action after the deal was sealed.
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Jan 5, 2017 19:55
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Even for his time Crassus comes across as an rear end in a top hat. Re: "what modern science / technology could the romans have used" aka the time traveler problem": I think mathematics is probably the single biggest thing "one person" could have changed. Mathematicians familiar with Euclid could probably be convinced to accept modern proof, and there is a lot of low-lying fruit in elementary number Theory, abstract algebra, combinatorics, statistics, and calculus that requires no materials around them to make them work. . I don't know what kind of technological change this would lead to, but better mathematics and better engineering tend to go hand in hand.
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Jan 5, 2017 20:05
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From the last time we discussed the whole time machine theory, the best bet i remember for something that would have real consequences is gunpowder (which the Chinese already had so its not implausible) and bronze/brass cannon. They could have made pretty effective cannon that would have been completely dominating in any naval capacity, and even made rudimentary iron cannon (but far, far more expensively than 1000 years later which is critical). I'm not sure how game changing they would be on the battlefield, as I'm not sure how well they would have worked when scaled down to a man-portable version, but emplaced cannon firing shot into massed infantry in 100 AD would have been a pretty big asset.
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Jan 5, 2017 20:36
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Ofaloaf posted:I have a historiography question which might belong here or in the Medieval History thread- Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain includes several purported kings who are supposed to have ruled during Roman times. Did Geoffrey think that Britain wasn't conquered, or that these kings all sort of paid lip service to Roman suzerainty, or what? Is there a historical basis for any of these Roman-era British kings, apart from maybe conflating some Roman governor or usurper with a native Briton somehow? Geoffrey's basing a lot of his history on Welsh stories, some of which were coming together and we can see glimpses of as far back as Gildas, if not Nennius. And Geoffrey almost certainly had a copy of Nennius to draw from, among other sources. It's less that Geoffrey thought that Britain was never conquered, then that the Welsh (and contemporary Irish) had differing levels of sovereignty. Only the Over-king held full sovereignty (the ard-ri in Ireland, possibly gwelig in Welsh), the power of full law and rule over a place. But there could be under-kings (tigernos/t(h)eyrn), servile tribes that had a separate but diminished political and legal existence. In Ireland these under-kings gave hostages and tribute to their overlords. Now, how the different authors use that distinction is very interesting. Gildas uses the distinction between king and tyrant (tyrannos sounding suspiciously like teyrn) in Latin to condemn almost the entire British royal class as perfidious, faithless, oathbreakers, graspers, desperate for every scrap of power and distinction they can murder and betray their way to, in comparison to the Roman over-kings. Nennius, and by extension Geoffrey, I believe have a more "national" take, of the British king(s) taking their rightful place.
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Jan 5, 2017 20:41
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Can't go into a whole lot of detail on Geoffrey now because I don't have a copy of him anymore, but there's definitely cases where actual Romano-British figures passed into later legend. Geoffrey's British king/Roman senator Maximianus is the same figure as the Welsh legendary Roman emperor Macsen Wledig, and both are the same guy as the real historical figure Magnus Maximus, the commander of Britain who fought a civil war against Gratian and was briefly recognized as western emperor before being deposed by Theodosius. He was particularly remembered by the British because he was basically the last Roman commander to lead a significant number of troops in Britannia or exercise any imperial sovereignty over the island.
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Jan 5, 2017 20:51
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WoodrowSkillson posted:From the last time we discussed the whole time machine theory, the best bet i remember for something that would have real consequences is gunpowder (which the Chinese already had so its not implausible) and bronze/brass cannon. They could have made pretty effective cannon that would have been completely dominating in any naval capacity, and even made rudimentary iron cannon (but far, far more expensively than 1000 years later which is critical). I'm not sure that Rome with gunpowder wouldn't mean anything other than more efficient and deadly civil wars. It's hard to imagine early cannon being mobile enough to help against barbarian raids and invasions. Sure, they'd be good for defensive locations, but raids and invasions tended to avoid walled cities and strong points anyways. Naval domination doesn't really mean anything unless we are talking about much later (post-476), since they already controlled the entire Mediterranean.
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Jan 5, 2017 21:32
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Gully Foyle posted:I'm not sure that Rome with gunpowder wouldn't mean anything other than more efficient and deadly civil wars. It's hard to imagine early cannon being mobile enough to help against barbarian raids and invasions. Sure, they'd be good for defensive locations, but raids and invasions tended to avoid walled cities and strong points anyways. Naval domination doesn't really mean anything unless we are talking about much later (post-476), since they already controlled the entire Mediterranean. Brass/bronze cannon never got very large as the castings could only support so strong of a charge. However they would be pretty easily made into pretty similar field artillery to that being used in the napoleonic period. Anywhere horses could pull carts, cannon could go too. i do not know how much they would have changed historically, but i'd posit the borders would be easier to control and battles more easily won, at least until other people start copying the Roman designs. That however would also change the world at least somewhat. Maybe it just leads to the crisis of the third century killing even more people and destabilizing it further, maybe it means Rome devastates a couple armies and conquers Germany before Varus gets his army destroyed and avoids the Gothic crisis by settling the Goths in largely empty German lands.
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Jan 5, 2017 21:45
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WoodrowSkillson posted:I'm not sure how game changing they would be on the battlefield, as I'm not sure how well they would have worked when scaled down to a man-portable version, but emplaced cannon firing shot into massed infantry in 100 AD would have been a pretty big asset. edit: although it's an interesting accident of history that man-portable firearms predate really big poo poo by hundreds of years HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Jan 5, 2017 |
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Jan 5, 2017 22:46
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Patter Song posted:In the city of Rome itself, poor Romans lived in these horrible makeshift apartment complexes called insulae (islands). They were shoddily-made and prone to disastrous collapse or fire. If I recall correctly, the first floor apartments were the "Penthouses" of the time, in that it was extremely desirable to live on the ground floor so you could escape if (when?) the building caught on fire or collapsed. The REALLY poor people got the top floors.
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Jan 5, 2017 23:51
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HEY GAL posted:you do not need man-portable cannon to fight a battle: the biggest 16th and 17th century field guns, while still not as big as siege pieces, were immobile once the fight started. you dug in around/in front of the guns (or used gabions) to protect the gunners and the battle took place "around" their positions That said, AFAIK artillery of that era wasn't usually hugely decisive in field battles as opposed to sieges? You don't really see artillery as the Queen of the Battlefield til like the Napoleonic era.
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Jan 5, 2017 23:58
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The thing with trying to bring electricity as a time traveler is that short of party tricks, electrolysis, and small-scale telegraphy, anything trying to make use of it is going to require the manufacture of vacuum tubes and light bulbs and vast networks of cables and poo poo. Similarly, generating enough current to be useful will be challenging without any sort of rotating engine, which would be a hard sell due to the general disinterest in labor saving devices and the comparatively poor quality of Roman metallurgy. Though I guess you could have a shitload of slaves turning a giant crank  Short-range radiotelegraphy using a simple spark-gap transmitter would probably be workable, and an easy enough sell.
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Jan 6, 2017 00:25
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Jerusalem posted:If I recall correctly, the first floor apartments were the "Penthouses" of the time, in that it was extremely desirable to live on the ground floor so you could escape if (when?) the building caught on fire or collapsed. The REALLY poor people got the top floors. Something tells me this was the case right up until the invention of the elevator.
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Jan 6, 2017 01:19
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Something tells me this was the case right up until the invention of the elevator.
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Jan 6, 2017 01:22
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PittTheElder posted:Something tells me this was the case right up until the invention of the elevator. When we didn't have elevators, top floors in particularly tall buildings were still quite popular and fashionable, but not as overwhelmingly popular as they became after elevators. Due to sheer inconvenience, if you were a rich high roller you usually wouldn't live solely in that fancy top floor, but also have rooms lower down, or possibly on a low floor in another building. But nobody would particularly want the top floor in just another 3 floor building, just like they don't in non-elevator buildings now, making attic and general top floor rooms tend to go cheaper, just like basements do.
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Jan 6, 2017 02:12
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Jerusalem posted:If I recall correctly, the first floor apartments were the "Penthouses" of the time, in that it was extremely desirable to live on the ground floor so you could escape if (when?) the building caught on fire or collapsed. The REALLY poor people got the top floors. Yep, it was the reverse of today. If you want to see those apartment buildings there are ones in Ostia that still have upper floors, which I never saw anywhere else. However there are better examples. I don't remember the name of the city but there's one in Yemen that's sort of famous for these super dense apartment complexes, and there are still some medieval apartment towers in various Italian cities. Those are all quite similar to Roman insulae. Slumlords in Rome are awful and fun. Rome had fire problems now and then and had all sorts of regulations on how tall buildings could be and spacing and such, which everyone would ignore. I think seven stories was supposed to be the limit but there were apartment blocks with 10+ stories all the time. If you look up pics of Kowloon Walled City, I'd bet you the poorer areas of Rome looked a lot like that. Less Chinese but otherwise.
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Jan 6, 2017 02:38
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I think Mary Beard did a show that included looking at the remains of a Roman apartment building, and she showed one of the (tiny!) rooms and then pointed out markings on the floor that indicated the room had actually been expanded and originally it was only half the size. Basically there was room to lie down and sleep (provided you weren't too tall) and that was about it.
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Jan 6, 2017 04:15
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hailthefish posted:The thing with trying to bring electricity as a time traveler is that short of party tricks, electrolysis, and small-scale telegraphy, anything trying to make use of it is going to require the manufacture of vacuum tubes and light bulbs and vast networks of cables and poo poo. Similarly, generating enough current to be useful will be challenging without any sort of rotating engine, which would be a hard sell due to the general disinterest in labor saving devices and the comparatively poor quality of Roman metallurgy. Though I guess you could have a shitload of slaves turning a giant crank Waterwheels. (Coincidentally, I want to say these were a mediaeval invention the Romans didn't use that extensively but could build fairly easily)
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Jan 6, 2017 04:17
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Grand Fromage posted:Yep, it was the reverse of today. If you want to see those apartment buildings there are ones in Ostia that still have upper floors, which I never saw anywhere else. However there are better examples. I don't remember the name of the city but there's one in Yemen that's sort of famous for these super dense apartment complexes, and there are still some medieval apartment towers in various Italian cities. Those are all quite similar to Roman insulae. Is there anywhere that has the reconstructions of what the 7-10+ story blocks would have looked like, especially with other buildings around them? Like especially what sort of exterior design the Romans actually used.
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Jan 6, 2017 04:18
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Romans had water wheel powered factories.
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Jan 6, 2017 04:21
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Based off of responses the best way to improve Roman Technology is to unlock the improved metallurgy tech. 
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Jan 6, 2017 08:17
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The concept of inflation could have been useful.
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Jan 6, 2017 10:34
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Feminism. 
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Jan 6, 2017 10:38
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CommonShore posted:The metallurgy isn't that basic. It has to be unbelievably consistent to make the moveable type which allows the Gutenberg-era industrial scale of printing. There's a reason that the Romans had both stamps and (I think) screw presses but no printing press. I wouldn't say "unbelievably" consistent. You make type by pouring any molten metal into moulds. It's true that early modern type foundries were able to optimise this process by tinkering around with their "type metal," using knowledge from the medieval pewter industry (antimony for sharper edges, for example). But they were stretching themselves to make the clearest and most durable type, for printing very small and complex letters. If you were happy with bigger and simpler font, I don't see why bronze wouldn't work perfectly well. If there's some reason you couldn't cast that finely with Roman techniques, there really nothing stopping you from detailing up the type by hand before printing. CommonShore posted:You also need paper because vellum/parchment are too expensive for the basic drudge work that makes a press worthwhile, and papyrus is poo poo. Lots of incunables (early books) are printed on vellum. I take your point that there were barriers preventing printing having the same sort of revolutionary effect across ancient society as it did in early modern Europe, but I don't think there's any reason it couldn't have flourished as a skilled trade making prestige objects, which was how it functioned in early years after Gutenberg.
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Jan 6, 2017 12:10
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LingcodKilla posted:Leather sourced from dead slaves might work decent on the roads. I saw some old tires using wood, that could work, too. Maybe even both: Wood for cross country, leather for roads!
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Jan 6, 2017 13:23
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Just introduce the printing press and paper mill. Maybe also stills, so Romans can get rollicking drunk on brandy too. Friar John posted:Lot of stuff here, I'll speak a little about what I remember. Honestly what's really throwing me for a loop is the story of King Lucius and the introduction of Christianity to Britain in the 2nd century. How could Geoffrey, Nennius, Gildas & co. reconcile the idea of Britain becoming officially Christian two centuries-or-so before Constantine, while being part of the Roman Empire? The story of all the early Christian martyrs was fairly popular and well-know as far I can tell, so surely they knew the the Empire itself was still pagan and persecuting. How is that supposed to gel with the idea that even (lesser?) kings went Christian in Roman Britain at the same time without them all being overthrown/obliterated by the Romans? I'm just overthinking myths, aren't I.
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Jan 6, 2017 18:04
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Mr Enderby posted:I wouldn't say "unbelievably" consistent. Part of the problem with surveying the print industry in the years after Gutenberg is that the most-produced and most-popular materials (textbooks and pamphlets and lottery tickets) were basically used to destruction, so we have few surviving witnesses. Yes, there were printed books on vellum, but they were far from the norm. Even only a minority of Gutenberg's bibles were printed on vellum, and the bibles aren't even really representative of Gutenberg's production. They were his magnum opus, not his bread and butter. He made lots of other cheap crap before that. Consider too that if we're using larger bronze moveable type, we're getting fewer characters per page at greater cost per character (bronze vs lead alloy), and using substantially more paper/vellum, which is already the most expensive bookmaking material. Whether bronze is more or less durable than lead is probably irrelevant, as an advantage of the lead-antimony alloy and Gutenberg's process is that it's a trivial amount of effort if you have the hand moulds and print matrices to just melt down the beat-up type and fresh cast it. IIRC bronze casting requires more heat and equipment. Your point about prestige objects is valid, but for the most part print is really bad at competing with manuscript for producing prestige objects. Someone who is looking at producing a really nice edition of an early book will look at the costs of producing in print - the capital investment especially - and say "why don't I just hire a bunch of scribes to do it instead?" It's only once the press is able to produce lots of cheap poo poo for profit that it's able to make a go of those vanity copies. I can't think of many examples of commercial prestige printing in England before the subscription model of the early eighteenth century (Pope's Iliad etc.). That scriptora were still viable all the way to the end of the seventeenth century (and I don't know enough about the eighteenth century ms culture to say when it ended) underscores that point. So unless printing came to Rome in some form that allowed the press to threaten the well-established scribal industry with all of its skill capital, it probably would be a wet fart. I'm having so much fun even thinking about this stuff 
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Jan 6, 2017 19:04
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