Y'all don't give yourselves near enough credit for what sounds "common sense" to you.

It would look more like this.

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Electricity is a hard ask to even attempt to do in ancient times. Luckily there's a variety of other simpler things to establish yourself as a genius inventor - strirrups, wheelbarrows, magnetic compasses, the idea of a crank handle, and how to use triangular bracing to make a strong truss would be good options.

Yeah, you can't just lay down electricity, especially not practical electricity it requires a ton of diverse knowledge from many different studies. What I would do is give them the concept of using steam to power to spin wheels or create an engine. Then use gear ratios to show them how to scale it up. Idk if they had found neodymium magnets back then, but teach them how to use them to heat iron by spinning them on the end of a steam engine and you're starting to cook with electricity.

Again, getting to electricity from there is still a whole fucking chore. But hopefully you could rely on science to advance way faster from your advances than if you weren't there.

Actually, the most important thing you could give the greeks is the concept of the modern scientific method. That shit was invented so late and just skyrocketed science (literally) the moment it was refined.

Just write a book about everything you remember about a null hypothesis, randomized blind trials, control experiments, variable control etc. if you can squeeze any bit of statistics out of your brain, even if it's just making a graph, you probably advance the world by thousands of years.

During a get together someone asked if you could go back in time, what one item would you take with you? My cousin said his cell phone so he could have unlimited knowledge with him. I was called an asshole for telling him it wouldn't work unless he downloaded it all on his phone and asking how would he charge it.

That's a joke-turned-plot element from one of the Hitchhiker's Guide books. The protagonist, a human everyman stranded with a primitive culture on a distant world realises he has no idea how electricity, steam engines, medicine, etc works but he becomes a respected member of their community by making sandwiches.

Well i actually know how to produce electricity so...wait- i don't have magnets

Huh. At first, I thought that was about rubbing the kitty with some amber.

"Thales of Miletus, writing at around 600 BC, noted that rubbing fur on various substances such as amber would cause them to attract specks of dust and other light objects." (Yes, that Thales.) It is still, or again, a popular demonstration, though we use plastic instead of amber. Amber in Ancient Greek is "elektron".

Electricity works by moving electrons from point a to point b.

There are different ways of acomplishing this. Easiest is to have an electrolyte between zinc and copper. Kids use a potato for their science class. Volta used cloth soaked in saltwater.

Which is also why call it "Volt" and "Voltage"

I have very few practical skills in the modern day.

But if you need to set up a society from scratch, I can get you electricity, steel, solid agriculture, and a handful of life saving medications depending on climate.

imagine showing them the quadratic equation and they're just like "why does this matter" and just being like "idk I barely passed"

I'm pretty sure there was research done that showed that people who are hypothetically transported back in time, won't be able to make any meaningful contributions to the era they go to. They will just end up integrating in that the society of that era.

Basically if you go back in time to medieval Europe, you could introduce something like paperclips to society, but you won't be able to introduce things like computers even if you know how they work and how to use them.

Just about everyone will be successful at some things.

Everyone knows how to make:

• Fire
• Lever
• Wheel
• Clay blocks
• Penicillium molds (antibiotics!)
• Wine
• Flatbread
• Can work out a very basic steam turbine (pot+wheel)

Quite a few also know how to make:

• Bellows and basic forgery tools
• Various simple fabrics
• Simple water pumps
• Simple carts, bicycles
• Galvanic cells, or maybe even alternating current sources (+wheel=hydro/steam power!), incandescent light bulbs
• Cheese and regular bread
• Beer, cider, moonshine
• Soap

You can also teach them the basics of proper hygienic procedures to keep their food safe, their hands free of pathogens, etc.

I actually read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court recently. It's one of those things where I knew the whole story going in because pop culture had remade it several times for both children and adults. I got Star Wars the exact same way. But I recently listened through the original on LibreVox.

Twain apparently wrote it to poke fun at a friend of his who wrote stories about noble knights errant, which is why he creates an ancient people who are perfectly ignorant and perfectly gullible, that stories of "rescuing maidens from a giant" were extremely embellished stories of buying pigs back.

Then there's the entire aspect of a modern engineer teaching a historical people new technology. Twain makes a BIG deal of "Arkansas journalism" and convincing knights to carry advertising billboards with them which would have been very modern and American to a 19th century man. But also he manages to set up a printing press in a land that doesn't understand pulp paper, a telephone network in a land that doesn't understand electricity...in apparently a couple years?

Me? I think I'm an above average candidate for this scenario, I'd die in a boiler explosion attempting to build a steam engine.