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What would amaze a 16th century visitor?

Keith&Co.

Keith&Co.

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Someone plucked from the gallery in Shakespeare's theater, say.
What aspect of modern life would be the most stunning revelation to him, about how things have changed.

There's the meme, someone holding a phone, telling the time traveler, "I have a device that fits in my pocket and allows me to access the sum total of all human knowledge. I use it to look at cats and argue with strangers all over the world."

There's another, somewhere, about the heart stopping discovery of a Roomba. Witchcraft.

Frankly, though, i suspect his biggest difficulty will be understanding all the things we WON'T eat.
"No, man, that was on the floor."
"No, i saw you drink from that."
"I, uh, I don't like the water from the bathroom tap." (My dad was this way. WOULD NOT drink from the bathroom sink, even to rinse toothpaste. Carried a cup in from the kitchen.)
"No, it was left out of the fridge for too long."
"There were flies on it."
"Goat cheese? Eugh!"
"Bleh. The beer's gone flat."
 
Perhaps most amazing would be that they are still alive after some 500 years.

There is no shortage of technological stuff, all magic to the 16th-century person: electric lights, automobiles, flying machines, computers, the internet, automatic firearms, solar cells, plastic, artificial hearts, transplant surgery, antibiotics, vaccines...

Of course various social developments would be astounding as well, for example representative democracy with poor people of various races and religions allowed to vote.

The age of the earth, our evolution, the distance to other stars and galaxies...

Peez
 
Peez said:
Of course various social developments would be astounding as well, for example representative democracy with poor people of various races and religions allowed to vote.
Click to expand...
I think they would be more astounded by the fact that they find it almost impossible to find anyone that they would recognize as poor.
 
Mostly technology / transport / infrastructure. Even people in the 19th century would fawn over the internet. Hell, I still fawn over the internet sometimes.
 
I suspect they would be principally impressed the advances we've made in personal weaponry, and horrified at the precipitous decline of piety (with resultant miracles and so forth) in Europe.
 
A 16th Century Englishman would certainly be shocked top learn that the answer to the central political question of his day - 'Will England be ruled by a Catholic King or a Protestant King?" - is "Neither, it is ruled by Parliament with the monarch as a powerless figurehead, and the majority of the people never attend either church". Almost every political conflict that a sixteenth century man would have taken an interest in has been won by neither side, with something completely unexpected having occurred to render the supposedly important questions moot.

He would be astonished at how unimportant Spain and Portugal are internationally, and at the power and wealth of the American plantations; and at the insignificance of Cathedral cities and their bishops (who are shortly expected to be removed entirely from the House of Lords), and of hereditary peers and aristocratic landowners generally. The existence of a professional standing army, beholden only to parliament, and the disappearance of militia forces raised 'ad hoc' by landowners at the king's request, would certainly be a major change. Indeed, the lack of both casual and organized violence would be surprising to him - sure, you can still get mugged in London, but the number of corpses floating down the Thames on a typical day is down dramatically.

Despite coming from London, he would also be amazed at how many people live and work in towns and cities, and how few in the countryside - and at how important and wealthy the urban counties are, in comparison to their rural counterparts. In 16th Century England, East Anglia was the centre of wealth, power and trade, as it comprises excellent farming land with good access to the east coast, so that produce can easily be sold to London, or exported to Scotland, France or the Low Countries. Liverpool was a tiny fishing village, and Manchester, Birmingham and the Black Country were poor market towns. Ipswich, Norwich and Cambridge were amongst the most important cities outside London.

He would also be amazed at just how large, and how clean, London itself has become, and how many towns and villages of his day are now incorporated into the metropolis. He would also be surprised at our infantilisation of teenagers - a teenaged boy was, in his day, expected to earn his own living; and it was routine for girls as young as fourteen to be married off, and starting families. Our unfamiliarity with, and resulting lack of acceptance of death would be a surprise too. Modern people simply don't expect people to die so regularly, or so suddenly.

Very few of the things he felt were worth striving for, or even fighting for, remain relevant; And those that do have mostly been resolved strongly against the popular opinion of his day. Of course, you needn't go back as far as the C16th to find this - a random man from London 1913, or 1938, would likely be astonished at how badly his ideological goals have fared; and at how much technology has transformed every aspect of society.
 
Indoor and hot water plumbing are what I appreciate most.
 
Clean drinking water on demand, hot showers on demand, toilets and sewer systems, and grocery stores full of food. For a start. Basics we take for granted.
 
I think one of the first things to amaze would be the sheer number of large, healthy people, including large cohorts of healthy elderly and healthy children.

From a slightly different tangent, years ago I read the biography of Ishi,  Ishi_in_Two_Worlds, who was the last surviving member of the Yahi tribe of Native Americans who was found starving in the bush of California in the early decades of the last century. He was taken to a Natural History museum in San Francisco where he survived for a few years as a kind of living exhibit (I believe he was paid for his time).

IIRC Ishi was not really impressed with telephones or electric lights, or even the daredevil aeronaut who flew an airplane from Golden Gate Park. What fascinated Ishi were venetian blinds. Make of that what you will.
 
William Shakespeare is famous for writing stage plays, dramatic presentations for theater. But over the last century, theater dramas have become a cultural backwater, with Shakespeare ones being the some of the most common ones. There are still various common sorts of live-theater entertainment, however, like concerts, stand-up comedy, and stage magic.

What has happened to theater dramas? They have gone high-tech, in the form of movies and TV shows. One records them on film or videotape or computer persistent storage, then edits them together. One typically records one scene at a time, doing it over if necessary. One can build a set for that, like a room, or one can film on location.

Movies can not only be live-action but animations, sequences of drawings, or mixtures of them. Nowadays, one can use computers to make the animations.
 
Musical instruments? Many present-day ones would look familiar or half-familiar. Drums and cymbals and other such instruments haven't changed much of the centuries. Wind and plucked-string and bowed-string instruments would look familiar or half-familiar. But keyboard instruments would be very startling.

The most common ones back then were the pipe organ and the harpsichord. The pipe organ is a keyboard-controlled ensemble of wind instruments. The harpsichord is a keyboard-controlled ensemble of plucked-string instruments. In the 18th century, the piano was invented, a keyboard-controlled ensemble of struck-string instruments. The harpsichord went out of style because a piano could be played louder, making it more suitable for concert performances.

Electricity would be even more startling. The most obvious use is amplification, making it possible to sing for a large crowd. One could also amplify the sounds of whichever instruments that one wanted to play. But electricity made possible new kinds of instruments.

One of them is a motor-generator. The first electrically-powered musical instrument was Cahill's Telharmonium, around 1900. With a keyboard, one switched on and off the outputs from motor-generator sets. But it was an expensive monstrosity. A miniature version of it, the Hammond Organ, was very successful in the early-to-mid 20th century. Adding generators to existing instrument mechanisms is what makes the electric guitar. Many electric guitars don't have an acoustic-guitar soundbox -- it's unnecessary for them. Electric pianos have also been common, and some people have even made electric violins.

Another is purely electronic generation. The most common one for a long time was various kinds of electric organs. One has to make an oscillator for each key, and that limited what one could do with them. If one adds some signal processing to an oscillator, one can give a tone some more elaborate time behavior than starting and stopping. But it required a lot of circuitry, and the Moog modular synthesizer and many of its analog-synth successors could make only one note at a time. If you listen carefully to Switched-On Bach, for instance, notice that it uses a lot of melodies or multiple intertwined melodies and hardly any chords.

Also back then was an instrument called the Mellotron. It was a keyboard-controlled ensemble of tape-playback systems, and it would be given an ensemble of tapes with instrument sounds, one for each key.

One could get around that analog-synth problem by having several tone generators, but one then needs a dispatch system from keyboard to tone generator. That nevertheless became common in the 1970's and 1980's. In the 1980's, purely digital synthesizers, samplers, and hybrids became common, and a more recent kind of digital tone generator has emerged: physical modeling - simulating a string or an air column or a drum head or analog-synth circuitry.


Our time traveler might think that one still has to play back everything by hand. I don't know how far back music boxes go, but our time traveler might have been familiar with them. That's essentially analog sequencing, and that became common around 1900 in the form of player pianos. One would give them piano rolls, rolls with holes in them to make the player piano make notes. In the electronic era, sequencing became common in the 1970's. A combination drum-sound synth and sequencer was invented back then: the drum machine. Early sequencers tended to sound stiff and mechanical, and I've seen people grumble about "robotic music". Later ones were much better, and later drum machines often played back the sounds of real drums. Nowadays, one can record and edit sequences with computer software.


An alternative to making piano rolls was to record the sound of a performance, and that emerged over the early 20th cy. As tape recording emerged, multitrack recording emerged, so that one could record each part on a separate track, then adjust each track's contribution to the final sound. Multitrack recording also made it possible to record extra versions and even to make a multipart piece track by track. That's how one-person bands like Prince have worked. He would sing and play every instrument part, track by track.


Also of interest is the sizes of the larger music ensembles. They went from small to large to small from then to now. Small to large to be louder, large to small because one could be loud without being large.
 
In the 80s I knew someone who spent a few years in the Peace Corp in remote places.

He said when he got back a supermarket was overwhelming.
 
Vaccines and penicillin, I think. Would fully amaze our 16thc traveler. Maybe add birth control pills.
What wondrous miracles all these have wrought.

edited to add - okay, and heart transplant surgery. Not to mention the fully synthetic heart that Cheney has.
 
In the 80s I knew an engineer who spent a lot of time for Locked in Pakistan and other places. He said he had friends send him bottled water and toilet paper by the pallet.

There was a time when there was a toilet paper crisis in Venezuela, maybe still. A sticky situation.

Its been dome in the movies. Take an Amazon aborigine and take him to Manhattan.

Post VN War Hmong tribesman who got out were having sudden death while sleeping. It turned out they had no concept of living on a globe. They could not handle the realization of the reality.
 
bilby said:
blastula said:
Indoor and hot water plumbing are what I appreciate most.
Click to expand...

...and soft toilet paper.

All the conveniences (pun intended) that you miss if you go camping would be amazing to our hypothetical time traveler.
Click to expand...

Even when you do go camping they're going to be amazed. That magical tent that you can see right through but it keeps the bugs out! And even with it's rain shield it's incredibly light. (The lightest 1-man tent is 1 pound 5 ounces, but that's very pricey and not that durable.) Not to mention the bed in your pack, a few pounds to sleep comfortably when there's snow outside. And that little gadget that cooks your food but weighs about a pound.

And that flat gadget in your pocket that always draws a map of where you are? Witchcraft!

Hopefully he would have no occasion to be amazed at that gadget that's smaller than my fist, but if you push the button on it help shows up no matter how far out you are.
 
Rhea said:
Vaccines and penicillin, I think. Would fully amaze our 16thc traveler. Maybe add birth control pills.
What wondrous miracles all these have wrought.
Click to expand...
in order to be amazed by penicillin one had to be at least made aware of germ theory. Before that it's jut funny looking white beans and nothing to be amazed about. Electronics, cars and planes is what would have amazed these people.
 
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