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How Far Back Can I Throw You?
Time Tunnel was a cheesy Irwin Allen science fiction show about a government project to facilitate time travel that ran for one season on ABC in the late 1960’s,* starring James Darren, Robert Colbert, and former Miss America Lee Meriwether. There was a lot of historical inaccuracies in episodes set in the past and a lot of people wrapped up in aluminum foil for shows set in the future. Of course, our protagonists seemed to be able to function highly anywhere and in any time.
If, by mechanical means or the power of angels, how far back into the past do you think you could be thrown back and still survive? Could you hunt for food and build shelter in the 1850’s? Would your children even know how to operate a phone in the 1940’s? Could you find work or would you create it? Good Lord, what would you do without the Internet!?
Send me back far enough and I could pass as a doctor, my 21st Century layman’s knowledge would surpass that of many professionals in the 19th. Put me at the dawn of network radio and I could become the stuff legends are made of.
*Many things ran for only one season on ABC in those days. The standard joke was that the best way to end the war in Vietnam was to put it on ABC – it would get cancelled in 13 weeks.
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Might as well stay with the Sherman and Mr. Peabody approach, back in the day they used to burn folk with new ideas – At least Peabody had pithy jokes.
I remember watching The Time Tunnel!
Everything is on the Internet:
It would be pneumonia for me – contracted first as a sinus infection that became a bronchial infection that became pneumonia, which would kill me dead so dead. Before I ever turned 15.
Kind of sobering, huh?
Seawriter
Theme by “Johnny” Williams. Yes, that John Williams.
And speaking of music… from the new Broadway hit, Something Rotten! (language warning)
There was an old Twilight Zone where a guy went back in time and bought a mine thought at the time to be worthless, but in the future he knew it had ended up being worth millions. So he went back there and spent all his money buying it. But he forgot that the technology to be able to drill down far enough to get anything out of it wouldn’t be invented for another 100 years (or something like that)
I loved the Time Tunnel – in fact TV back then was actually fun, even with the awful acting – Batman, Dark Shadows, The Monkees, remember that nutty sitcom with Imogene Coca called It’s About Time?
You bring up an interesting question…..my sister made the comment the other day that kids today don’t even know how to make a pot of soup from scratch. If all of a sudden, God forbid, something happened and we had to be off the grid, would anyone know what to do? Yes….the old timers, soldiers, people living in rural areas, scouts, some Hispanics I’ve seen in the grocery stores who are here working, make a pot of soup out of a bag of greens and some spices last a week – very frugal.
I collect vintage books – my sister got me started – but the best ones tell you how to heal ailments from herbs, making ointments to treat burns at home, etc. She sent me a book called “How To Build A Fire and other things your grandfather knew” by Erin Bried- its full of tips everyone should know. The affluent and millennials would be completely lost……
For me, this true for anything before I was born. I love reading about the past, but I wouldn’t want to live in it.
I spent much of last year reading the entire Outlander series. The main character and her family travel both ways to and from the 18th century. When Claire, a nurse, returns to the 20th century the first time, she becomes an MD. When she returns to the 18th century, she takes some penicillin and a hypodermic syringe with her, as well as 18th century coins. When that runs out, she starts a little factory, making her own penicillin from ordinary green mold, and it works fairly well. Her daughter, an engineer in the 20th century, goes back to the 18th and starts on a plumbing system, making her own fired-clay pipes to bring water from the spring on their property. It’s very interesting, all the modern inventions they manage to duplicate with contemporary materials.
As a true daughter of modernity, unable to do without hot and cold running water, I wouldn’t want to go back much farther than the 1920s. But I’d sure take the stock information, and make a killing in the market after 1929.
When young read up on the whaling industry (Boston Whalers) and a grandly profitable effort in it’s time. To romantisize the past is far better than having to participate in same. Many came to a horrible end on both land and sea. Rather consume the histories, Thank You –
If it’s just a time visit, as opposed to spending my life in that period, I’d like to have met Jesus. Then Vienna in the 1890’s, skip WWI, and the 1920’s before the crash.
If it’s to go and live, nuh-uh. I’d be blind without modern visual care, toothless without modern dentistry, crippled by sciatica without cortisone shots, and wouldn’t have made it past age 3. Even as late as the 1930’s and 1940’s my grandmother used to kill and pluck the chickens for her family to eat – I’d have a hard time doing that, too.
Seawriter is right – it’s grand to read about history or stories in historical settings, but to live in? I’ll take the present, thank you.
From EJ’s title of throwing us, I took that to mean a surprise, one-way trip. You arrive with whatever you have in your pockets.
So we’re all too reasonable to have any real attraction to the past? Is there nothing from the past for which anyone in their right mind would risk all the lack of medicine?
It’s really tricky to do. You could contrive it one way, like Twain does in his yankee tale. He relies on the fact that the American male is a born tyrant. People who do not concede that would not really like his story.
But he also lived before Descartes prophecy came true. Medicine, you will see, is what truly separates us from the past. We are too certain about death, & that simply cuts off any possible life except what’s possible now. It’s as though, from our view, nobody in the past ever lived.
But there are practical problems, too: Speaking the language. What would you really understand of English as spoken in England by the English in Shakespeare’s times?
Finally, there is the simple matter of attraction. If you just get thrown into some random past, what’s the point? You’d have to choose at some level something attractive. Even if like Twain you’re more interested in humiliating honor than ennobling people.
My point was that if you can go back and forth, or even plan your trip ahead of time and take a knapsack to a known destination, everything changes. The reason my plan was so simple was that I needed something I could do immediately, as in before I got too hungry, using the tech of the time.
Sadly, I think he qualifies for realistic or optimistic.
Ok. Then consider me the loyal opposition. There has got to be some charm in the past that is not immediately, urgently, fatally dependent on work!
Mesmerism was all the thing. Bet you’d be good at that sort of stuff. Just hypnotize them all with a torrent of words and convince them to give you money. How is your French? It was a necessity within many of the courts of Europe.
Time Tunnel was random. But let’s say an angel gave you an opportunity to take your family back in time to avoid a nuclear war and its aftermath. Then what would do?
Nuclear war or the past? Hmmn, exactly when in the past? This could be a hard choice or an easy one.
Actually, I wouldn’t mind going about sixty or seventy years back. Chances are I wouldn’t live to see Obama again. And I might be able to meet a few interesting people.
On this topic, I suggest the Stephen King novel, “10-22-63” – an interesting take on time travel and a pretty good page-turner. It’s written well enough that suspension of disbelief is relatively easy.
If you-all are serious about preparing for this contingency, here’s the shirt you should wear while out and about:
https://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=TO&Product_Code=QW-CHEATSHEET&Category_Code=QW
Can you still get small pox vaccinations? Mine’s 70 years old.
If I could bring my husband, and maybe my game wardens with me, I could survive anytime and would probably enjoy myself a lot. If I had to go alone…? nah. I can barely survive today.
Finally, a airtight question. How do I love the past, let me count the ways? I might just beg the angel to take me to revolutionary America. An entire generation of politicians on a level not seen at almost any time. A literate population who knew their Bible & Shakespeare. Like Wordsworth said, to be alive in that new dawn was bliss, & being young, were very heaven! I tend to think about things the other way around; I don’t read all those biographies of your Founders for the fun of it; I’m liable to jump at the opportunity to go there faster than I can second-guess myself. Yeah, I know, wooden teeth & all that…
That was a myth. They used hippo ivory or human teeth.
You’re ruining my hopes here, but I guess hippo ivory is going to do.
If anyone participating in this conversation has not yet read 1632, by Eric Flint, I recommend you do so. Click on the link for a free online copy. You’re welcome.
Seawriter
I think it was P.J. O’Rourke who said he would not want to live in the past for one simple reason: dentistry.