This is something that I have been thinking about a lot recently. Since the Ancient Egyptians knew about electric shocks from eels, the Ancient Greeks knew about amber and static, and the Baghdad Battery was clearly made, what civilization or culture could have both discovered electricity and used in any capacity, even as just a entertainment for the rich?
What civilization or culture could theoretically discover and utilize electricity before 1800?
- Thread starter HyperMuscularDemon
- Start date
Other than parlor tricks (amaze your friends with Little Zeus's Lightning Maker! By Heronco) probably not much before the mid-1700s. As I mentioned in another post, making high voltage capable of doing useful things will be difficult prior to modern times. Understanding on how to make and keep a vacuum along with craploads of experimentation to find the right filament element (tungsten) will be necessary for a light bulb. Metallurgy skills for the production of pure metals will be necessary for heating elements that don't quickly burn out. You sort of "need strong artificial magnets to make strong artificial magnets" for generators and motors. Barring scientific inquiry and a culture of experimentation and information sharing to propagate technology development, developing these will be hard.
Simple low voltage metal-acid batteries are possible to stumble across (the Baghdad Battery you mentioned) but not of much use for anything functional. So a small battery-powered spark-gap generator to awe the worshipers in a temple of Zeus/Jupiter seems possible.
Much like Greco-Roman steam power and the Antikythera Device you're likely limited to Interesting Toys at this point.
Simple low voltage metal-acid batteries are possible to stumble across (the Baghdad Battery you mentioned) but not of much use for anything functional. So a small battery-powered spark-gap generator to awe the worshipers in a temple of Zeus/Jupiter seems possible.
Much like Greco-Roman steam power and the Antikythera Device you're likely limited to Interesting Toys at this point.
That is kind of what I was talking about. Enough of a discovery is made with low level of electricity devices that it becomes a temple device, although only for very powerful temples. Eventually, a curious genius comes along and maybe decides to take a look.
The idea that the Baghdad Battery is actually a battery is pretty controversial, with most archeologists believing that it was instead a ritual storage jar for sacred writings. The episode of MythBusters where they do make an (extremely low-powered) battery out of the rough design of the Baghdad Battery actually covers the counterarguments against it being a battery pretty well, explaining what changes need to be made to make the artifact work as a battery and bringing on an archeologist from the opposing side to explain how it resembles other non-electrical storage jars of the period, including the use of copper and lead as sealants. So I wouldn't say the Baghdad Battery was "clearly" made.
That said, what civilization was well positioned to stumble across a recognizable and repeatable electrical "entertainment"? Might I propose India. Leyden jars, those staples of early electrical experimentation, are built out of glass, alcohol, and highly conductive metal foil. Of those, metal foils were easily the rarest and most expensive component for most of history, and therefore unlikely to just be added to random glass bottles of alcohol. But, in India, Vark, a thin silver foil was traditionally used as a decoration in cuisine. Somebody adding Vark to particularly expensive alcohol, and then being introduced to its "shocking" effects after somehow making a conductive connection into the bottle (in Leyden jars, driving a nail through the bottles cork was used), is an unlikely but not impossible series of events. Figuring out how to do this repeatedly, and then turning it into an entertainment for the nobility, would be even harder, of course. But medieval India's concentrated trading wealth, entrenched noble class, and luxury production capabilities all make it the most likely of any ancient civilization I've considered to accidentally stumble onto an electrical gimmick and then keep playing with it for a while rather than just immediately abandoning the whole thing as painful and pointless.
Ah okay. That makes sense. Using a discover date of around 450 AD, in Gujarat, how far can Asian Indians tinker with this alt Leyden Jar and with electrical technology and electricity itself? Also how would this affect Asian Indian society and culture.
Not very far, unless they make a series of conceptual breakthroughs beyond "this thing will shock you" that they frankly have no background to guess and start developing. This is going to be a strange novelty for a very, very long time. Luckily, they do have a written culture, and if the shock bottle makes it into the right books, it stands a chance of reemerging once the intellectual conditions are right and ideas about electricity start to circulate. A Leyden jar equivalent reaching Europe in the 1650s could really initiate some interesting developments.
In India proper, in 450, even basic chemicals for expanding their electrical experimentation further (like sulfuric acid, key to lead-acid batteries, believed to have been first intentionally created in the 900s near Baghdad by Islamic alchemists) simply don't exist or are completely unavailable.
The key to their version of the Leyden jar is silver foil, and they have no reason to work out that cheaper options like copper or lead foil could work instead, since they don't have a tradition of making such non-food-safe metals into thin foil. So these shock jars are going to be extremely expensive, which will limit how widespread they are and what kind of experiments people are willing to do with them.
They have no reason to connect this type of shock to lightning, and no access to animals like the electric eel which could make them realize this is a broader phenomenon. Compasses and magnets, both of which exist in India at this time period, are too rare and expensive for anyone to realize they react to a completely unrelated extremely rarre and expensive novelty. Without a very deep scientific base, there just isn't any easy way to start making electrical engineering developments combine and compound with each other.
To them, this will be, at best, an expensive toy- but it just might be an expensive toy that sticks in people's minds, and centuries down the road starts to inspire further experimentation when the chemistry and magnetism knowledge starts building to the point where it could be taken advantage of. Also, if any description of these things makes it into any kind of Hindu or Buddhist holy text, then when its rediscovered in the modern era it will absolutely become a talking point for devotees of that religion.
Okay. You have a point there, but when is the absolute minimum Asian Indians can tinker and experiment with both the alt Leyden Jars and electric technology in general? Plus, is it possible for an Asian Indian temple or king who has very little silver but plenty of copper or lead foil, or other metals to build an alt Leyden jar and substitute for silver?
Wait, really? It seems to me that most civilizations would have a very hard time even establishing widespread simple low voltage electric devices. Even in best case scenarios such as above - the Asian Indians discover a alt Leyden jar in the year 450 AD - it would a very unlikely to come up with electricity in a storable and usable form in a few decades, and the best timeline of developments would likely be constant small scale tinkering that gets bigger and bigger as it continues.
(Also, I do not mean to brag, but I wrote a timeline called When the Tlingit Embraced the Seas, and you can read it if you want to. It is all your choice.)