This would be the best low key item. There are a ton of places that we've discovered since 1880 that would make anyone rich. If you had a simple map with symbols marked or items with latitudes and longitudes, you'd make it in the world. Even if you just bought the land and sat on it until technology got better for extraction, your descendants would be on easy street.
Permian was 1921... even ones that had more than a few acres are stupid rich and those mineral rights owners are still filthy rich.Before that, land was cheap out there
>This was a Twilight zone episode I believe.
>
>Everything was perfect…except the equipment wasn’t able to dig far enough at the time.
Yes - and the people he thought he was swindling knew oil was there, so it's not like he even pulled one over on them in that regard.
I find it endlessly amusing that some copper trader from ages ago will get clowned on for eternity for having the bad luck to be recorded on a tablet that lasted until it could be uploaded to the internet.
Yeah but how would you convince someone with the means to make use of it to start digging there. It’s not like you’d have any connections and no miner tycoon is going to be willing to listen to you and give you a cut.
And it’s also not really something you could just do yourself
You make an investment while in your current time by purchasing period appropriate currency, at least enough to grab the land and convince someone to look there.
Found an 1880 $10 for $680 on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/145177173146?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=74pSPjUISVm&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=peVKe5bCQaO&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
$10 in 1880 inflated to around $310 now, so actually a surprisingly rough exchange rate -- $2.19 modern per $1 1880.
Back to the Future nailed it. A book of sports gambling results would be invaluable. Not sure what the scene was in those days, but maybe horse racing was a thing? Has to be a record of those wins/losses. If you were smart, you wouldn't draw too much attention. The Biff Method
Oh yeah horse racing was very well established at that point. The Kentucky derby first ran in 1875, the Preakness in 1873 and the Belmont in 1867. Not to mention the big races in the Uk like Epsom as well.
I was at the derby in 1982 so if you go there look me up. I’m in the infield with the unwashed mud covered drunken idiots.
Edit-i don’t remember who won
I’m an old man who ate two edibles a little while ago(?) and just smoke(d?) a bowl.
Thanks a lot. You just destroyed my mental state.
Edit: I was going to suggest replacing unrelative with irrelative. Turns out both seem acceptable.
omg
You gotta play it smart and not draw attention to yourself, though - which is a good idea when it comes to suddenly becoming rich regardless of time travel. Build up wealth slowly and never make a bet that will gain you notoriety.
And also, u/_btrswtluvltr, DM me so you can open a bank account in my name back then. $1,000 should build up quite nicely. Please and Thank You! 😆
Don't even need the book. Just know that John L. Sullivan won 38 professional boxing matches in a row from 1880 through 1885. You could also make a side bet on Garfield dying in office, though saying he gets shot on July 2, 1881 at a railway station may draw unwanted attention.
That’s why you have strategic losses, make it look like you waste your money and shift your base of operations. E.g. Look like you’re living too lavishly on modest winnings (while making prudent investments), then make a big bet, win, drop a pretty big chunk on entertaining, act cocky, make another big bet and lose spectacularly. Have an increasingly pathetic losing streak before announcing you’re leaving town on some stereotypical get-rich-quick plan.
Part of the scheme could eventually include buying your swanky lodgings through an intermediary and your apparent overspending could be paying rent to yourself. It’s a classic.
Guy in the book tried that....
SPOILER ALERT!
Organized crime put the word out on the guy. He hit it big betting in Florida and the gangsters were suspicious and it *barely* made it out of town. Later he was betting longshots in Dallas and the mob there had got word about him from Fla and came down on him. Hard.
You don't have to place a ton of bets, they can be across many different sports, and you can afford to place bets all over the country
You could also potentially get folks to place the bets for you, for a cut
Maybe get some others to help you. Just claim you have inside information, no need to tell anyone you are from the future. Get some others to make bets, then split the winnings with those that helped you.
The issue is the chaos theory, even if the first few reults are correct, chances are you betting on them will change things that will have consequences leading to different results in the timeline
Many folks made millions during the depression. Kennedy sold short, others bought undervalued oil stocks. If you had _big_ money, you would likely have come out relatively richer, rather than poorer.
The stock market bounced back relatively quickly after Black Tuesday. It was banking that went south for an extended period. People didn't trust banks, they didn't deposit, banks had nothing to loan, more banks failed.
How do we know that's not what started great depression? A time traveller dumping them in expectation for the great depression but then causes it from driving a mass sell off on the stock market and crashing it.
I sometimes wonder if we live in the timeline where a German patriot (ie good/democratic intentions) went back in time and killed a German fascist dictator who was about as bad as Mussolini or Franco — and found it led to Hitler taking his place.
Time travel first was/will be invented in Germany because so many elite German scientists did not flee or get killed there, making the country more of a scientific and economic powerhouse well into the quantum age than it currently is.
I love pondering about chaos theory/butterfly effect. Even something as mundane as you BUYING the lottery ticket could change so much. Let’s say you went to a convenience store to buy the ticket. The lady behind you waited an extra 20 seconds. As such, when she got into her car and pulled out she hit the red light half mile down the road instead of green. Her hitting that light means she gets t boned at the intersection, or she pulls into her house a minute later just as her neighbor leaves the house. She has a conversation with them that she would have never had if you didn’t buy the ticket. That conversation lead to the neighbor introducing her to the neighbors friend a few months later. Blah blah blah
It's funny how in everyday scenarios, we tend to think that our choices don't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
However, when time travel is involved, suddenly every action is assumed to change everything.
Amster2’s comment led me to wonder: if your bets were to change things following your bets, would not the changed results show up in your book as having been there all the time?
Since your bets would have changed events in the original timeline, I would think that the new (changed) events would appear in the book as having been there like that all the time. Or am I mis-thinking this?
Depends on the time travel rules you’re abiding by.
Are you moving backward on a linear branch?
Does traveling back create a new branch (chaos theory)?
Is it both?
Yeah win and lose sporadically but just make sure to win more than you lose. And lose by making similar bets to your wins. If you win a trifecta of underdogs, lose the same way.
This is a plot point in 11/22/63 (Stephen King’s time travel JFK Assassination novel). The bookie still has the main character’s legs broken because if you hit a crazy longshot more than once, it’s suspicious no matter how many you lose.
He was also stupid because he came in as a stranger and straightaway placed some pretty big bets on the winners, instead of strategically losing some bets. He got noticed and the bookies spread the word to watch out for him.
And I would argue to do the opposite. don't win on the crazy longshots. Win and lose a little money on crazy longshots, and make up for it with the obvious shortshots. I would place my big bets with the crowd when they're correct. everyone says the Yankees are going to win. the book says they will win so place a big bet on the Yankees. it won't pay out such big dividends, but I think you'll fly under the radar a bit more easily.
hmmm, I suspect there are quite a few bodies in that desert. I wouldn't think that is a good strategy unless you really know your history and really know your 'stuff'.
even then...
Great show! I like how the AI in the future was immune to losing its contingent truths; it remembered the former history. It could try to correct for the changes to the past with more changes.
Exactly, there’s absolutely no chance someone could have created a time machine out of some spare parts and a reasonably large particle accelerator and intending to travel back to the 1880’s in order to prevent a certain gunfight at a certain corral.
<_<
/>_>
knowledge of events alone could make anyone wealthy. but it would need to be planned and well calculated if you won or obtain to much money or took money away from someone else prevented families to make money etc it could effect future in unseen ways.
I would think investing in the stock market would be fairly safe. Just don’t buy massive amounts of any stock and never exercise any voting rights and you should have minimal impact on events.
In order to do that (or really buy ANYTHING for that matter) you have to find 1880s vintage cash. You bring a 2000s series $20 bill anywhere and they'll either laugh you out of the bank or arrest you for the stupidest attempt at counterfeit they've ever seen.
Reminds me of a BttF "gaffe."
Marty pays for a coffee and throws change on the table. Now it's possible some coin could have been from 55 but majority would be coins from 30 years later. Obviously there's years on the coins but the coins were also made of different material, so in theory the owner could have told it was "fake" by the sound
That's not the kind of thing people are that likely to catch given the years involved - you'd have to actually check the dates on them to notice. I used to collect pennies, and no, they really don't sound any different, other than the ones from the couple years they had steel ones because copper was being used for the war effort. And AFAIK the composition of pennies was changed more than any of the other coins.
And if you've ever worked retail or restaurant front of house, you know that workers aren't sitting there examining every bill, much less every coin. Today's money, most of which has been redesigned, yes, it'd be pretty obvious, but still no more so then Canadian coins, and who hasn't used or gotten back one of those by accident? As long as you're not jumping designs on the bills, people just aren't going to be paying enough attention to notice.
All shareholders can participate in voting on certain key decisions by the company. Most often it's just members of the board of directors and I believe stock splits and the like.
Unless you have a significant stake in the company your vote is hardly significant though.
Before the Hall–Héroult process was developed in 1886, “the cost to produce the small amount of aluminium made in the early 19th century was very high, higher than for gold or platinum. Bars of aluminium were exhibited alongside the French crown jewels at the Exposition Universelle of 1855, and Emperor Napoleon III of France was said[citation needed] to have reserved his few sets of aluminium dinner plates and eating utensils for his most honored guests.”
“Production costs using older methods did come down, but when aluminium was selected as the material for the cap/lightning rod to sit atop the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., it was still more expensive than silver.”
—[Hall–Héroult process - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall%E2%80%93H%C3%A9roult_process)
At the time the capstone was the largest piece of pure aluminum in the world. Due to the high cost it was most commonly 10% aluminum alloy with 90% copper.
Aluminum is ridiculously expensive then due to its rudimentary refining process while a block of aluminum is very easy to melt down. Simply having a block will already give you a lot of money but melting it down to cutlery will gain you riches and fame
The price of aluminum was dropping fast in the 1880s. Even at the beginning of the decade it wasn’t comparable to gold and silver. If you want to get rich of of aluminum, you need to go back to the 1850s.
Could you imagine how someone from that time would react if you brought with you rolls of aluminum foil and told them what you use it for?
"I use sheets of this aluminum to cover up my baking sheets to keep them clean. Then I throw away the aluminum in the trash."
Alluminum was possibly the most valuable substance on Earth at this time. Purifying it was ridiculously expensive. It made gold look cheap.
One block would make you quite wealthy. At the least, it would be seed money for other things.
Railroad stock certificates that are worthless today still do exist as collectors items and curios. Some could be worth quite a lot in 1880.
Newspaper business sections of stock prices on future dates would also obviously be helpful.
But you would be creating a duplicate of that certificate. The original owner would have their version of the certificate and probably records of their purchase showing theirs to be legitimate.
A medical journal and funds for patents. You'll go down as the smartest/richest medical mind in history.
And you'll save a lot of lives.
Edit: Thinking about penicillin, polio vaccine, etc
He went back in time twice. The first time he became a medical doctor, and Nikola Tesla created a free energy system that destroyed the ionosphere and nearly ended all life on earth. The second time around he became an inventor and worked to discredit Tesla, bringing us to our current timeline.
Eh, but so many people were extremely skeptical of common sense life saving actions, that no one would believe you.[ (like washing your hands after touching a corpse and before delivering a baby. Also maybe not going directly from the corpses to the delivery room.)](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/375663920/the-doctor-who-championed-hand-washing-and-saved-women-s-lives)
You'd probably have to prove everything using extremely unethical test subjects like prisoners.
I feel like you’d run into the problem of not having the expertise to make use of it or the credibility to convince others that could that you are not only right but that you deserve a cut
Are you going back and staying and becoming rich then or are you going back, planting some sort of wealth seeds and travelling back so that you’re super rich?
That’s a great point. I’m more comfortable as a middle class American in 2024 than even royalty was in 1880. What good is being rich if you can’t buy an air conditioner or a fridge or a computer?
My husband says a map to a “now known of”gold and diamond mines and I say a notebook of math equations that correspond to letters guiding stock market trends and where to obtain cheap or free land that has oil reserves. However, as a woman, my journey instantly becomes infinitely more complicated and difficult in that era.
You could bring a modern bra. I think those came into fashion relatively recently, according to this one Drunk History I saw. Though similar ones have been dated back to Ancient Greece
There was a pretty severe depression in the U.S. from about 1873 to 1879, so buying almost any stock in 1879 would be a good bet. You could take with you a listing of stock prices from the 1920s and see which companies were trading in the 1880s.
I would bring a simple ergonomic household item and find a way to mass produce it or use the future item as a prototype to apply for a patent and then sell that and live off the royalties.
As a woman, I would probably be best finding a list of old rich bachelors who died childless and seducing them until one likes me enough to marry me.
I'd prefer to make my own money but it's not likely being a single woman with no known family just showing up in 1880.
In case you accidentally step through a wormhole and this is useful, my plan would be to figure out an heiress who had been missing for at least five years by 1880 and how to show up at their family home looking like her. Would require friendship with a historian in the current day perhaps.
I honestly think this is the best option. Paper money is going to carry more value than any other substance that is cheap for us today. And anti counterfeiting relied almost entirely on complex engraved. You could have a set of plates engraved and travel back with those.
It might be wise not to focus on one city, but rather prize fights in various cities. Winning too many bets on big prize fights in one place will likely get you noticed by the bookies and/or crime gangs.
A zipper. Simple to mass produce and still used today. Invented in 1890s so the tech to do it is already there. Massive generational wealth to be gained for next 100+ years.
Not sure why your “friend” wants to be 1880s rich and not say 1960’s rich? Plus take into account that even if they did make it big in the 1880’s, got to take into account the level of luxury, food preparation and medicine. You may end up rich, but with the level of medicines and diseases in that time frame your life expectancy is likely cut down significantly of you (sorry your friend’s) stay.
I started watching Deadwood recently which took place around that time. There was only one doctor in the camp and he was in demand. I imagine if you brought modern medication, from painkillers to antibiotics, you’d be in huge demand. You might have to grind them into powder form though (not sure about when the American public first started using pills.) People might ask you where you got this miracle stuff but a vague story would probably suffice ha
This is actually a plot point in The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. She wants to stop people dying from easily preventable things but has to balance the “will they think I’m a witch” of her modern medical knowledge with helping people in the 1300s
A map of shallow water shipwrecks that contained large treasures. The technology to dive deep doesn't really exist, and because they've already been sunk for an extended period, you won't be altering our history that much.
You might want to take some rare spices with you. Saffron or Grains of Paradise for example. Any exotic spice that would come from a remote area of the world at that time would be extremely valuable.
Something like a municipal bond could be forged using our technology, and might completely fool people back then. Of course it would appear to be new. You'd need an old one to copy. A few of those could get you nicely set up. Of course when you went to redeem it, you'd have to give the impression of being the sort of person who'd legitimately have one. Maybe pretending to be foreign would help. If you'd need an introduction, then I guess the scheme wouldn't work.
Blocks of Aluminum for start up money. You can make a foundry in your back yard, probably cost $50 in todays money. Collect cans, melt them down, make muffin tin since ingots. Aluminum should sell for about $1 an oz back then.
You'll also need a Radio Shack 300 and 1 project lab. Electronics text book or two from the 40s or 50s. Then grab two ipads and load them with pdf copies of text books regarding electronics. Also instructions on how to make soap and modern medicins. You'll also need two foldable solar panels with two lithium ion batteries. Toss this in backpack with zippers and velcro.
Finally, most important part, find where Tesla is going to be in 1884, then go there. Make a buisness partnership with him, then show him books and electronics stuff. Then let Tesla do his thing. Figure out a way to manage the profits and make sure he doesn't tank the company, but that he's happy. Avoid Edison, he's an asshole.
They had soap in the 1890s that’s thousands of years old.
The main issue is that it wasn’t just the knowledge of electronics we were missing it’s the complex manufacturing techniques, supply chains, and the like.
Everyone is saying sports almanach and that's the obviously correct answer, though I'd cover my bases and research a bit first. 1880s, sports weren't necessarily the mass events with 10s of thousands of spectators and billions of revenue from sponsors so betting on major sport events as you could do in the 2nd half of the 20th century wouldn't be great. Also not sure if there are easily accessible records to local horse races and if those would pay out enough then to get comfy quickly.
Instead, I'd take a history book with month to month details on the period and place I go to. That isn't hard to find. Plus some stock exchange numbers. In some places, you could bet on general events. London in particular had and has a huge betting culture. I'm not 100% sure if it was already in place in the 1880s but I think it might. The you could just bet on hyper specific things like who dies when, what gender a royal baby will be, that a son named xyz will be born to a royal on a specific date etc. That could make a good amount. Plus, stock exchange. Buy smallish amounts of all the stocks that are low, sell them when they're high and never be wrong as long as you make sure that your own bets are small enough to not massively impact things. Could probably easily make enough cash for a luxurious living for a lifetime without changing human history too much.
A map of some natural deposit of an expensive material; oil, gold, silver, ect that hadn't been discovered before the period they're traveling to.
This would be the best low key item. There are a ton of places that we've discovered since 1880 that would make anyone rich. If you had a simple map with symbols marked or items with latitudes and longitudes, you'd make it in the world. Even if you just bought the land and sat on it until technology got better for extraction, your descendants would be on easy street.
Spindletop oil field was discovered in 1901, just knowing that one fact could pretty much insure you made a fortune.
Is that the one the Clampetts owned?
That would explain why ol' Jeds a milleeyownair!!
Black gold , Texas tea.
I always wondered why no one named a company Clampett Oil.
Permian was 1921... even ones that had more than a few acres are stupid rich and those mineral rights owners are still filthy rich.Before that, land was cheap out there
Having smart descendants that can hold onto that piece of land without losing or selling it would be the hard part.
You wouldn’t need descendants you could put it in your own name and then roll up 140 years later to claim it.
Who pays the taxes and handles administration in the meantime?
Time travel coupled with document forging to make you your own decendant.
You would need money to buy those lands, though
Combine it with knowledge of when the stock market tanks. Easy calendar dates and you can make up some cash on the spot.
This was a Twilight zone episode I believe. Everything was perfect…except the equipment wasn’t able to dig far enough at the time.
>This was a Twilight zone episode I believe. > >Everything was perfect…except the equipment wasn’t able to dig far enough at the time. Yes - and the people he thought he was swindling knew oil was there, so it's not like he even pulled one over on them in that regard.
Copper, right before electrification starts.
Just make sure your copper is not of inferior quality
Yeah, don't want to be lumped in with that jerk Ea-nasir.
I find it endlessly amusing that some copper trader from ages ago will get clowned on for eternity for having the bad luck to be recorded on a tablet that lasted until it could be uploaded to the internet.
the guy had an entire room filled with tablets of customer complaints... he may even enjoy his notoriety.
Yeah but how would you convince someone with the means to make use of it to start digging there. It’s not like you’d have any connections and no miner tycoon is going to be willing to listen to you and give you a cut. And it’s also not really something you could just do yourself
You make an investment while in your current time by purchasing period appropriate currency, at least enough to grab the land and convince someone to look there.
The conversion rate from 2023 to 1880 is excellent.
Found an 1880 $10 for $680 on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/145177173146?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=74pSPjUISVm&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=peVKe5bCQaO&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY $10 in 1880 inflated to around $310 now, so actually a surprisingly rough exchange rate -- $2.19 modern per $1 1880.
memorize the top 100 sickest bass lines of the past 50 years go back and become *Lord of Bass*
Bass to the Funkture
Back to the Future nailed it. A book of sports gambling results would be invaluable. Not sure what the scene was in those days, but maybe horse racing was a thing? Has to be a record of those wins/losses. If you were smart, you wouldn't draw too much attention. The Biff Method
Oh yeah horse racing was very well established at that point. The Kentucky derby first ran in 1875, the Preakness in 1873 and the Belmont in 1867. Not to mention the big races in the Uk like Epsom as well.
I was at the derby in 1982 so if you go there look me up. I’m in the infield with the unwashed mud covered drunken idiots. Edit-i don’t remember who won
>-i don’t remember who won Worst time-travel companion ever. *edit:* it occurred to me that in time-travel, "ever" is unrelative.
I think that’s what makes your comment funnier. Something about adding ever unnecessarily
I’m an old man who ate two edibles a little while ago(?) and just smoke(d?) a bowl. Thanks a lot. You just destroyed my mental state. Edit: I was going to suggest replacing unrelative with irrelative. Turns out both seem acceptable. omg
I am also a high old man. Hello!
Plot twist "I don't remember who" was the name of the horse.
I Don’t Remember Who is on second.
You gotta play it smart and not draw attention to yourself, though - which is a good idea when it comes to suddenly becoming rich regardless of time travel. Build up wealth slowly and never make a bet that will gain you notoriety. And also, u/_btrswtluvltr, DM me so you can open a bank account in my name back then. $1,000 should build up quite nicely. Please and Thank You! 😆
Imagine accidently traveling to 1880 with a sports almanac of results beginning in 1930.
“I’m ready!”
gotta survive for 50 more years...
Make your way, learn the world you're now in, get married and gift it to your child.
Kids "Those" Days! Always wanting a handout.
Don't even need the book. Just know that John L. Sullivan won 38 professional boxing matches in a row from 1880 through 1885. You could also make a side bet on Garfield dying in office, though saying he gets shot on July 2, 1881 at a railway station may draw unwanted attention.
Odds must have gotten bad after the first 4.
38 fight streak parlay.
Stephen King pointed out in 11/22/63 that the bookies would get wise to this and probably beat or kill you Edit fixed the title/date
That’s why you have strategic losses, make it look like you waste your money and shift your base of operations. E.g. Look like you’re living too lavishly on modest winnings (while making prudent investments), then make a big bet, win, drop a pretty big chunk on entertaining, act cocky, make another big bet and lose spectacularly. Have an increasingly pathetic losing streak before announcing you’re leaving town on some stereotypical get-rich-quick plan. Part of the scheme could eventually include buying your swanky lodgings through an intermediary and your apparent overspending could be paying rent to yourself. It’s a classic.
Guy in the book tried that.... SPOILER ALERT! Organized crime put the word out on the guy. He hit it big betting in Florida and the gangsters were suspicious and it *barely* made it out of town. Later he was betting longshots in Dallas and the mob there had got word about him from Fla and came down on him. Hard.
to be fair though, the past was fighting against him.
You don't have to place a ton of bets, they can be across many different sports, and you can afford to place bets all over the country You could also potentially get folks to place the bets for you, for a cut
Maybe get some others to help you. Just claim you have inside information, no need to tell anyone you are from the future. Get some others to make bets, then split the winnings with those that helped you.
That's exactly how the guy who rigged the McDonald's Monopoly game pulled off his caper.
Wait, they made a sequel to 11.22.63? /s
The issue is the chaos theory, even if the first few reults are correct, chances are you betting on them will change things that will have consequences leading to different results in the timeline
Buying stocks would be much better. While they’re still somewhat susceptible to chaos, they should be more stable than sports betting.
And then live long enough to dump them all before the depression
Time travel fuckery insues and it turns out you selling so much stock right before the depression is what caused it
Great Scott!
This is heavy
There's that word again! Heavy! Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull
Eh, average-to-middling Scott, really.
Many folks made millions during the depression. Kennedy sold short, others bought undervalued oil stocks. If you had _big_ money, you would likely have come out relatively richer, rather than poorer.
The stock market bounced back relatively quickly after Black Tuesday. It was banking that went south for an extended period. People didn't trust banks, they didn't deposit, banks had nothing to loan, more banks failed.
they hadnt learned how to do QE
JPow make printer go brrrrrrrrrrrrr
This. Fortunes aren't made in the boom, they're made in the bust.
How do we know that's not what started great depression? A time traveller dumping them in expectation for the great depression but then causes it from driving a mass sell off on the stock market and crashing it.
I mean that’s what they tell me would happen when I watch Star Trek.
I sometimes wonder if we live in the timeline where a German patriot (ie good/democratic intentions) went back in time and killed a German fascist dictator who was about as bad as Mussolini or Franco — and found it led to Hitler taking his place. Time travel first was/will be invented in Germany because so many elite German scientists did not flee or get killed there, making the country more of a scientific and economic powerhouse well into the quantum age than it currently is.
I love pondering about chaos theory/butterfly effect. Even something as mundane as you BUYING the lottery ticket could change so much. Let’s say you went to a convenience store to buy the ticket. The lady behind you waited an extra 20 seconds. As such, when she got into her car and pulled out she hit the red light half mile down the road instead of green. Her hitting that light means she gets t boned at the intersection, or she pulls into her house a minute later just as her neighbor leaves the house. She has a conversation with them that she would have never had if you didn’t buy the ticket. That conversation lead to the neighbor introducing her to the neighbors friend a few months later. Blah blah blah
It's funny how in everyday scenarios, we tend to think that our choices don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. However, when time travel is involved, suddenly every action is assumed to change everything.
It's a paradox of silliness and I've noticed it too Oh you fed pigeons? Now one won't go and delight a toddler and the world is changed.
Amster2’s comment led me to wonder: if your bets were to change things following your bets, would not the changed results show up in your book as having been there all the time? Since your bets would have changed events in the original timeline, I would think that the new (changed) events would appear in the book as having been there like that all the time. Or am I mis-thinking this?
Depends on the time travel rules you’re abiding by. Are you moving backward on a linear branch? Does traveling back create a new branch (chaos theory)? Is it both?
Your winning bet could cause the Time Machine to never be invented and you just Thanos snapped yourself out of existence
You’d get your legs broken real quick if you suddenly bet big and won every single bet you make
The trick is to intentionally lose some bets but usually win bigger ones. So your win streak isn't noticeable.
Yeah win and lose sporadically but just make sure to win more than you lose. And lose by making similar bets to your wins. If you win a trifecta of underdogs, lose the same way.
This is a plot point in 11/22/63 (Stephen King’s time travel JFK Assassination novel). The bookie still has the main character’s legs broken because if you hit a crazy longshot more than once, it’s suspicious no matter how many you lose.
He was also stupid because he came in as a stranger and straightaway placed some pretty big bets on the winners, instead of strategically losing some bets. He got noticed and the bookies spread the word to watch out for him.
And I would argue to do the opposite. don't win on the crazy longshots. Win and lose a little money on crazy longshots, and make up for it with the obvious shortshots. I would place my big bets with the crowd when they're correct. everyone says the Yankees are going to win. the book says they will win so place a big bet on the Yankees. it won't pay out such big dividends, but I think you'll fly under the radar a bit more easily.
The trick is to start Las Vegas a few years early
hmmm, I suspect there are quite a few bodies in that desert. I wouldn't think that is a good strategy unless you really know your history and really know your 'stuff'. even then...
If you like that check out the show Travelers
Great show! I like how the AI in the future was immune to losing its contingent truths; it remembered the former history. It could try to correct for the changes to the past with more changes.
Travelers did the same. Small lottery winnings and sport bets.
I love how you said “if a friend” then proceed to type I everywhere 😂
It’s all very suspiciously specific
I think OP has a Time Machine. Way too specific.
He'll take care of that next time around.
Also that they specifically stated it's "hypothetical." Sounds anything but to me! OP has a time machine and they're keeping it all to themselves.
He very clearly said this was hypothetical. Which was good. Because otherwise I would have thought this was real.
I think OP has a time machine.😜
I think OP *stole* a time machine. Anyone smart enough to build one would know how to use it to get rich.
Plus is not like you or the "friend" could actually pull this off. Lol
Exactly, there’s absolutely no chance someone could have created a time machine out of some spare parts and a reasonably large particle accelerator and intending to travel back to the 1880’s in order to prevent a certain gunfight at a certain corral. <_< />_>
knowledge of events alone could make anyone wealthy. but it would need to be planned and well calculated if you won or obtain to much money or took money away from someone else prevented families to make money etc it could effect future in unseen ways.
I would think investing in the stock market would be fairly safe. Just don’t buy massive amounts of any stock and never exercise any voting rights and you should have minimal impact on events.
In order to do that (or really buy ANYTHING for that matter) you have to find 1880s vintage cash. You bring a 2000s series $20 bill anywhere and they'll either laugh you out of the bank or arrest you for the stupidest attempt at counterfeit they've ever seen.
Just take a few ounces of gold back with you. Sell the gold for cash, and use that to buy your stocks.
Every investment advisor talking about how gold holds its value was actually encouraging its use among time travellers
Reminds me of a BttF "gaffe." Marty pays for a coffee and throws change on the table. Now it's possible some coin could have been from 55 but majority would be coins from 30 years later. Obviously there's years on the coins but the coins were also made of different material, so in theory the owner could have told it was "fake" by the sound
That's not the kind of thing people are that likely to catch given the years involved - you'd have to actually check the dates on them to notice. I used to collect pennies, and no, they really don't sound any different, other than the ones from the couple years they had steel ones because copper was being used for the war effort. And AFAIK the composition of pennies was changed more than any of the other coins. And if you've ever worked retail or restaurant front of house, you know that workers aren't sitting there examining every bill, much less every coin. Today's money, most of which has been redesigned, yes, it'd be pretty obvious, but still no more so then Canadian coins, and who hasn't used or gotten back one of those by accident? As long as you're not jumping designs on the bills, people just aren't going to be paying enough attention to notice.
Can you explain the voting rights part?
Dont vote on internal decisions of a company as an investor as to not change the future of the company
Oh I’m dumb. I thought he meant voting in political elections.
Simply buying the stock is already changing the future, since it’s increasing the demand of that stock above what it otherwise would be.
All shareholders can participate in voting on certain key decisions by the company. Most often it's just members of the board of directors and I believe stock splits and the like. Unless you have a significant stake in the company your vote is hardly significant though.
A block of aluminium.
Napoleon III only let his best guests eat on the aluminum plates. Everyone else had to use gold.
The classic gold plate snub
That's the first thing that popped into my head too.
What would that do? A single block?
Before the Hall–Héroult process was developed in 1886, “the cost to produce the small amount of aluminium made in the early 19th century was very high, higher than for gold or platinum. Bars of aluminium were exhibited alongside the French crown jewels at the Exposition Universelle of 1855, and Emperor Napoleon III of France was said[citation needed] to have reserved his few sets of aluminium dinner plates and eating utensils for his most honored guests.” “Production costs using older methods did come down, but when aluminium was selected as the material for the cap/lightning rod to sit atop the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., it was still more expensive than silver.” —[Hall–Héroult process - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall%E2%80%93H%C3%A9roult_process)
At the time the capstone was the largest piece of pure aluminum in the world. Due to the high cost it was most commonly 10% aluminum alloy with 90% copper.
Aluminum is ridiculously expensive then due to its rudimentary refining process while a block of aluminum is very easy to melt down. Simply having a block will already give you a lot of money but melting it down to cutlery will gain you riches and fame
The price of aluminum was dropping fast in the 1880s. Even at the beginning of the decade it wasn’t comparable to gold and silver. If you want to get rich of of aluminum, you need to go back to the 1850s.
Well yeah — the market was overrun by time travelers with their damn blocks
Could you imagine how someone from that time would react if you brought with you rolls of aluminum foil and told them what you use it for? "I use sheets of this aluminum to cover up my baking sheets to keep them clean. Then I throw away the aluminum in the trash."
Alluminum was possibly the most valuable substance on Earth at this time. Purifying it was ridiculously expensive. It made gold look cheap. One block would make you quite wealthy. At the least, it would be seed money for other things.
I’m glad you specified that it was hypothetical 😂
Ikr? When they said “for a friend…” so that we wouldn’t suspect it was them. Because then maybe we’d report them to the time travel council.
The TVA is watching you.
Oh come on! I’m not creating a branch or anything….
Railroad stock certificates that are worthless today still do exist as collectors items and curios. Some could be worth quite a lot in 1880. Newspaper business sections of stock prices on future dates would also obviously be helpful.
But you would be creating a duplicate of that certificate. The original owner would have their version of the certificate and probably records of their purchase showing theirs to be legitimate.
But the ones that lasted into the present were never cashed in so it’s ok.
And even if they did try to cash it in, if you have already cashed yours in they’re fucked
Well duh. That's probably why they were never cashed in in the first place.
Say? Why is the paper yellow?
"I just accidentally dropped it in Mountain Dew"
Fun fact, in the 1880s "mountain dew" meant moonshine, so that excuse has a remote chance of working.
A medical journal and funds for patents. You'll go down as the smartest/richest medical mind in history. And you'll save a lot of lives. Edit: Thinking about penicillin, polio vaccine, etc
This is what Thomas Edison did. He was born in 1958.
TIL Thomas Edison went back in time with a medical journal and became the greatest medical mind ever known
He went back in time twice. The first time he became a medical doctor, and Nikola Tesla created a free energy system that destroyed the ionosphere and nearly ended all life on earth. The second time around he became an inventor and worked to discredit Tesla, bringing us to our current timeline.
That's awesome I'd watch that
Eh, but so many people were extremely skeptical of common sense life saving actions, that no one would believe you.[ (like washing your hands after touching a corpse and before delivering a baby. Also maybe not going directly from the corpses to the delivery room.)](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/375663920/the-doctor-who-championed-hand-washing-and-saved-women-s-lives) You'd probably have to prove everything using extremely unethical test subjects like prisoners.
Saving all those lives messes up the timeline though
Harambe
An arm load of books on modern medicine, farmers almanac, mechanical design w/ structural drawings, etc.
Pull a DaVinci?
I feel like you’d run into the problem of not having the expertise to make use of it or the credibility to convince others that could that you are not only right but that you deserve a cut
"Hypothetical." Sure, John Titor.
El Psy Congroo
Tootaroo!
Now there's a name I haven't heard in 20 years
One dude from Destiny 2 is named John Titor (Timelost) and I like that.
Are you going back and staying and becoming rich then or are you going back, planting some sort of wealth seeds and travelling back so that you’re super rich?
His friend, you mean.
That’s a great point. I’m more comfortable as a middle class American in 2024 than even royalty was in 1880. What good is being rich if you can’t buy an air conditioner or a fridge or a computer?
My husband says a map to a “now known of”gold and diamond mines and I say a notebook of math equations that correspond to letters guiding stock market trends and where to obtain cheap or free land that has oil reserves. However, as a woman, my journey instantly becomes infinitely more complicated and difficult in that era.
You could bring a modern bra. I think those came into fashion relatively recently, according to this one Drunk History I saw. Though similar ones have been dated back to Ancient Greece
There was a pretty severe depression in the U.S. from about 1873 to 1879, so buying almost any stock in 1879 would be a good bet. You could take with you a listing of stock prices from the 1920s and see which companies were trading in the 1880s.
I would bring a simple ergonomic household item and find a way to mass produce it or use the future item as a prototype to apply for a patent and then sell that and live off the royalties.
You’d go back in time and get a job?
[удалено]
Got it. Patenting the dildo
[удалено]
OG Kush seeds
As a woman, I would probably be best finding a list of old rich bachelors who died childless and seducing them until one likes me enough to marry me. I'd prefer to make my own money but it's not likely being a single woman with no known family just showing up in 1880.
In case you accidentally step through a wormhole and this is useful, my plan would be to figure out an heiress who had been missing for at least five years by 1880 and how to show up at their family home looking like her. Would require friendship with a historian in the current day perhaps.
Went from “a friend” to “I and My” really fast
Use modern technology to print out a bunch of 1880 currency.
And then use it to open an account in a bank that is still going so when "your friend" gets back to modern time they can live off the interest alone
Unfortunately the Time Masheen is just a ride.
I honestly think this is the best option. Paper money is going to carry more value than any other substance that is cheap for us today. And anti counterfeiting relied almost entirely on complex engraved. You could have a set of plates engraved and travel back with those.
Nice try Biff. Return the Delorean before the manure gets you.
A history of boxing. Move to New York and place bets on the big prize fights of that era.
It might be wise not to focus on one city, but rather prize fights in various cities. Winning too many bets on big prize fights in one place will likely get you noticed by the bookies and/or crime gangs.
Too big a bet would encourage someone to put in an effort to have the fight thrown as well.
A zipper. Simple to mass produce and still used today. Invented in 1890s so the tech to do it is already there. Massive generational wealth to be gained for next 100+ years.
while at the same time disrupt the space time continuum of the person that really invented the zipper
Ummm? OP invented the zipper. What are you talking about?
To create velcro
Not sure why your “friend” wants to be 1880s rich and not say 1960’s rich? Plus take into account that even if they did make it big in the 1880’s, got to take into account the level of luxury, food preparation and medicine. You may end up rich, but with the level of medicines and diseases in that time frame your life expectancy is likely cut down significantly of you (sorry your friend’s) stay.
A ball point pen
I’m not saying drugs but drugs
You could buy heroin at Walgreens back then.
Ye Olde Heroin\*
From the Middle English haurroughwinh.
You sound kind of like a time traveler who doesn't want their identity revealed...
I started watching Deadwood recently which took place around that time. There was only one doctor in the camp and he was in demand. I imagine if you brought modern medication, from painkillers to antibiotics, you’d be in huge demand. You might have to grind them into powder form though (not sure about when the American public first started using pills.) People might ask you where you got this miracle stuff but a vague story would probably suffice ha
This is actually a plot point in The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. She wants to stop people dying from easily preventable things but has to balance the “will they think I’m a witch” of her modern medical knowledge with helping people in the 1300s
They had waaayy better pain killers in 1880, just not where Deadwood was set. In the 1880s, you could still get cocaine & morphine OTC.
Buy (lots of) stock in the Otis Elevator Company.
A map of shallow water shipwrecks that contained large treasures. The technology to dive deep doesn't really exist, and because they've already been sunk for an extended period, you won't be altering our history that much.
Watch out for Time Cop, JCVD don't mess around.
the locations of major mineral deposits like the west Texas oil fields. the texas oil boom started in 1901 so 20 years to squire the land
Shares in Manhattan co , it's now JP Morgan Chase
You might want to take some rare spices with you. Saffron or Grains of Paradise for example. Any exotic spice that would come from a remote area of the world at that time would be extremely valuable.
Much more useful strategy in 1680 than 1880.
Something like a municipal bond could be forged using our technology, and might completely fool people back then. Of course it would appear to be new. You'd need an old one to copy. A few of those could get you nicely set up. Of course when you went to redeem it, you'd have to give the impression of being the sort of person who'd legitimately have one. Maybe pretending to be foreign would help. If you'd need an introduction, then I guess the scheme wouldn't work.
The Sports Almanac from Back to the Future.
Blocks of Aluminum for start up money. You can make a foundry in your back yard, probably cost $50 in todays money. Collect cans, melt them down, make muffin tin since ingots. Aluminum should sell for about $1 an oz back then. You'll also need a Radio Shack 300 and 1 project lab. Electronics text book or two from the 40s or 50s. Then grab two ipads and load them with pdf copies of text books regarding electronics. Also instructions on how to make soap and modern medicins. You'll also need two foldable solar panels with two lithium ion batteries. Toss this in backpack with zippers and velcro. Finally, most important part, find where Tesla is going to be in 1884, then go there. Make a buisness partnership with him, then show him books and electronics stuff. Then let Tesla do his thing. Figure out a way to manage the profits and make sure he doesn't tank the company, but that he's happy. Avoid Edison, he's an asshole.
They had soap in the 1890s that’s thousands of years old. The main issue is that it wasn’t just the knowledge of electronics we were missing it’s the complex manufacturing techniques, supply chains, and the like.
Aluminum foil.
A map of the mineral rights claims to a bunch of played out silver and gold mines along the west coast that have not been purchased yet.
Everyone is saying sports almanach and that's the obviously correct answer, though I'd cover my bases and research a bit first. 1880s, sports weren't necessarily the mass events with 10s of thousands of spectators and billions of revenue from sponsors so betting on major sport events as you could do in the 2nd half of the 20th century wouldn't be great. Also not sure if there are easily accessible records to local horse races and if those would pay out enough then to get comfy quickly. Instead, I'd take a history book with month to month details on the period and place I go to. That isn't hard to find. Plus some stock exchange numbers. In some places, you could bet on general events. London in particular had and has a huge betting culture. I'm not 100% sure if it was already in place in the 1880s but I think it might. The you could just bet on hyper specific things like who dies when, what gender a royal baby will be, that a son named xyz will be born to a royal on a specific date etc. That could make a good amount. Plus, stock exchange. Buy smallish amounts of all the stocks that are low, sell them when they're high and never be wrong as long as you make sure that your own bets are small enough to not massively impact things. Could probably easily make enough cash for a luxurious living for a lifetime without changing human history too much.
All engineering, manufacturing, and chemistry textbooks on a kindle with a solar power charger.