• CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    8 months ago

    Yeah, but we’re in 1700, as in a year after 1699. They had the word “electricity”, and it referred to the tendency of feathers to stick to stuff. The first static electricity generator is recorded in 1705. Thomas Savery’s practical steam engine was patented in 1698, but probably wasn’t being used in actual mines as of 1700. The first impractical ones were recorded in classical antiquity, however. All the experiments and applications you’re thinking of were from much later that century.

    That’s actually kind of a nitpick, though. They have a chance to know more than a person from 1500AD, 1200AD, or 1700BC. The point is that all of them still know basically nothing. You’re not going to gain good analogies and comparisons until deep into industrialisation, and even then some things like computers will be tricky. Late life Ben Franklin would be somewhere in between, but it’s my personal guess him being Ben Franklin would be more helpful than his prior knowledge of the concept of conservation of mass.