So you desire to build a computer in the eighteenth century . Is it even possible ?
Probably not . Most people do n’t think about the actual amount of money and creature needed to produce exactly one junction transistor - ground computer , king it , and program it , to say nothing of the social challenge you ’d face up examine to progress this mellow - tech auto centuries ago .
Good luck getting the supplies
Today , having long vest in supplies like as asemiconductor fab , compilers , even something uncomplicated as alathe(which for anything other than wood is a 20th C innovation ) , we can knock off millions of these components and so the item-by-item price is in the cent . But the incremental provision Sir Ernst Boris Chain for semiconducting material fabrication is astonishing in ambit .
create a unmarried homegrown junction transistor , though , is potential — transistor fabrication so simple a child can do it . Even there , it assume the child has entree to aWaferof pureMonocrystalline Silicon . 99.9999 percent pure , with P or N dopant . depart from scratch , you only call for a precise oven at 1500C and a decent cum crystal and glass crucibles , as well asX - ray crystallographyto determine the ripe airplane to cleave the wafer . And , a twosome of liter of purified liquidArgon , for inert atm . No sweat . good bone up on all the techniques you will need and memorize them , because fresh mass took many days to develop even one of those technique from dinero .
But even if you put together a smattering of role reliably , how many parts are need to make even a basic four function calculator ? It ’s a challenge of reliability that is well illustrated byENIAC(or Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer ) .
ENIAC hold back 17,468vacuum thermionic valve , 7,200 crystaldiodes , 1,500relays , 70,000resistors , 10,000capacitorsand around 5 million hand - solderedjoints . It weighed more than 30short ton , take up 1800 solid feet , and consumed 150kWof power . Several tubes sting out every day .
Forget batteries . A lead acid stamp battery at its optimum is 180 W / kg , so just to emulate power for ENIAC is 830 kgs of lead window pane batteries You now have to mine and refine about a ton of lead ore andsmeltit , as well as make ( if you ’re favorable , and have a death regard ) a fair amount of 30%sulfuric acid . Clearly ageneratoris the room to go , or findingvanadium for catalysiswith the assistance ofJöns Jacob Berzelius . Or go withPhospho‐olivines as Positive‐Electrode Materials for Rechargeable Lithium Batteries — you already need that cristal - ray crystallograph .
You ’ll still need a 760 amp battery for the source , but that amount of star and sulfuric loony toons should be sourceable in the 19th hundred , for quite a little of cabbage , without you accept to reinvent smelting , having to set up shop in Sweden , or hunt downLepidoliteor brave theGovernment Junta of Chilefor Li ore . Although one ray of hope- a chintzy semiconducting material and CRT phosphor might be a spin-off of the waste matter of makingzinc , and the locals have been doing thatsince 1750 .
And a monumental amount of machine parts to close tolerances . No job : you could endeavor to convinceAbraham - Louis Breguetto swatch out some fine preciseness machinery . As a polymath , you of class speak fantabulous 18th century era French and Swedish , as well as the scores of terminology need to navigate between all the luminaries you might need to apply .
And a team of horses , to haul around the parts .
We also have an base for power supplying that is hard to replicate without million of dollars , along with teams of coder to do the heavy lifting of coding . expect to go back to a time where the average somebody had less than a tier school teaching , you might put unjustified strain on the substructure of polymath from that clock time .
The unsubdivided human action of getting talent — not to mention infrastructure and supplies — from around the world to assist a skilled leader can not be undervalue : the journey to “ Silicon Valley ” ( then a fruit orchard ) from the east seacoast in 1917 would at best taken100 miles per day by light truckand in facttook 62 days at 58 miles per daydue to breakdowns , road conditions , etc .
call up , any project to create a calculator is going to need raw materials , not just for the chips but also the tools to make the chip , the tool to make the tools that make the check , turtles all the way of life down . You need to find , train , house and feed an regular army of masses to do manufacture , lineament restraint , compiler and OS committal to writing . Ada might help , if she was n’t distrait byphrenology and suggestion , and financiers could be convinced tolet a young lady lead a team . It ’s not as round-eyed as going to a dorm atHarvardin the 1700s/1800s and pickinga handful of bright tiddler to help you . What you propose is radically unthinkable for the time .
Then , there ’s the money and leaders challenges . Even if you find one other person to facilitate you , with what will you make up them ? How will you convince them that being a “ magician ” is better than agricultural biography , or their current spatial relation in high society ? Capital , both fiscal and human , forinvestment flow at a much slower footstep before globalisation took time lag in the 1870s . Anyone who argues against globalization from in front of a computer screen has misunderstood what it ’s mean for companionship .
Basically , we have very little perspective on what we would really need tobootstrapan endeavor in essentially Gilligan ’s Island - like conditions . You would gestate that such an effort , even if technically possible , would not be socially or financially possible . Not like today , where vast pool of wealthiness and talent can be drawn on in a minute observance and flown in less than a 24-hour interval anywhere in the world .
But what if you did it anyway?
you’re able to try tobuild a computer with discrete transistorsexperimentally for yourself : a Scottish reel of 10000 junction transistor will cost you about 300 bucks . ( e.g. MMBTA06LT1 G ON Semiconductor | Mouser ) Build a computing machine , even with this leg up , today , with nothing but that head originate . Or even with all of the other stable portion , like resistors , diodes , capacitor , magnate supplying . And 12 of tinylightbulbsfor output , becauseGalliumfor LEDs was n’t discovereduntil 1875 .
The challenge is not the theoretical assembly , but the practical reality of large numbers . One bad chipping in that Virginia reel , or one burnout , or one progressive solder articulation , and you ’re screwed . you may not opine the leg up we get from memory chip , PLAs , microcontrollers : it is simply not imaginable . As basic as it gets — the chemical constituent needed for a calculator might not have been discover yet , no less thediscrete logic concept . What are you live on to do , kidnap the world ’s big minds and enslave them ?
Then , assay rent 2,000 satisfying invertebrate foot of clean and close in real estate to build ENIAC today either with tubes or transistors , and you will see the difficulty of find space to work up it . Millionaires do n’t just front any random stranger these variety of funds , and even today , assuming both be , it is very hard to negotiate a middling business correspondence for this kind of partnership .
Once you get the technical challenge behind you , you have the societal challenges .
A lot can chance in 20 years . tycoon rise and fall . Back then , disease ran rearing , and you would have little in the way of pharmaceutic to preserve yourself from a venial stroke at the smeltery .
You would in all likelihood , without any social connections or pedigree , be institutionalized if you try on to obtain the gazillion of dollars necessary to refine a little atomic number 14 , or even the metal and drinking glass needed for emptiness tubes .
There ’d also be discrimination and classism to contend with — god aid the non - white putative polymath if they traveled back in time to 18th century Europe to make estimator . Many bright inventors of the day faced the hard reality that guild was mostly gear up and immutable , and a “ nobody ” would have been sold into thralldom or servitude quicker than give the upper - class admission to scientific tool that a Newton might have had . Go back too far , and even knowing something like logarithm table ( John Napier ) would be less interesting to most people than witchery and the occult .
Check please
One must also consider what a exceptional exertion would cost . There was n’t enough unemployed capital available to jump such project . If just one part of that feat , say , mining resources , aim more upper-case letter than was useable at the time . you could say , I ’ll go wager a bazillion gold coin on fatal , because I cognise the outcome from the future , you realize that someone has to miss that bazillion dollars to pay out , and that if the result you are ground the bet is genuinely random , then you do n’t know that the act of being there for the result would not perturb it to be otherwise .
The gross domestic product of Britain / UK in 1700 was about $ 11 billion in 1990 dollar sign and $ 36 billion by 1820 , the pride of the European world , and yet it was dwarfed by the GDP of China at the time . The entire world between those period had between $ 371 billion and $ 694 billion 1990 dollars in GDP , with the overwhelming majority of that in agriculture . They spent to the limit that they could take over , giving some indication of the available complimentary float of money supply . They had so little barren tradable gold to deal for item in China , that they had to useopiumas money .
Forty percent of the mankind GDP ( assuming if you could rally people to ring together ) would be about $ 250 billion in 1990 dollars . Intel has a securities industry cap around $ 140 billion , so have ’s assume that the market cap of Intel is the pass cost of trying to make affordable computer microprocessor . If you could get enough of the humankind at that time working in concert , you could easily make an Intel or two . But , that ’s a very big if , and is the only estimation I can see that even do this logical argument plausible .
At $ 1200 , that ’s three dollar per mean solar day . study worldGross world producttoday , which is 10 times that , or $ 30 per day .
It is fair that the only economy in the world which might have had enough slack to make the output of a figurer happen would have been China . Around this menstruum , though , China was in the process of internal revolt and world power were divvying up theQing Dynasty . There were about 300 million people , the size of the USA universe today .
entire world universe was around the 1 billion mark , and if you use the ( optimistic , in my opinion ) Chinese literacy run number worldwide , that ’s less than 10k literate mass that would even be available as a imagination without a significant endeavour to educate them . The remainder were likely devoted to grow enough food to survive , or craftsmen , and you have to question whether or not take aim 15 years to provide enough pedagogy to a gang of “ children ” to work as a partner would be fat .
For instance , there were about 220,000 people in UK who had the rightfulness to vote ( and were therefore minimally literate — or about a third gradation level ) in 1790 . It seems reasonable that the massive increases in the ability to read over the point were a probable drive for increasing pressure for the right of suffrage . But I would say if you wanted multitude who had the knowhow and education to be able to realise and play upon the ideas of the sentence traveller , 10k people worldwide in 1800 seems a likely number , with about 30 pct in China .
The ability to capture and capitalise on chance has a long history of cover genius or particular insight with abuse , neglect , and distrust . Any scenario which require not one , but miracle after miracle , to succeed swiftly slenderize the fortune that our aspire time traveler would even be capable to communicate their tales of wonder with the people of the past times .
In this wish , study of such works asThe Reception of H.G. Wells in Europewould be exceedingly important to the traveler , understanding how narrative in fable is received is often indicatory of the social minefield one will encounter . To say nothing of the effect of likely paradoxes — would you really require to beBiff Tannen ?
Would It Be Possible To build up a Computer With 18th Century Supplies?originally appear onQuora . you may conform to Quora onTwitter , Facebook , andGoogle+ .
This answer has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity .
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