What's the earliest era in which people could reverse engineer a car?

[Rain Man]

The scenario:

It's a sunny Saturday afternoon, and you decide to go to a car show. There's a sweet 1977 Trans Am, black with gold trim, and you decide to sit in and pretend you're eastbound and down, loaded up and trucking.

In the next stall is a cherry 1988 DeLorean, but unbeknownst to everyone, the flux capacitor is on the the fritz. Some kids are messing with the car and turn it on, and it's accidentally set to transport 12 feet to the left.

Suddenly you and the Trans Am are transported back in time.

Now, we all know that there are three outcomes to this scenario.

1. You will live in the car in squalor until a dinosaur steps on it and crushes both of you to death.

2. You will be immediately burned as a witch or feted as a god by some culture that has little interest in internal combustion.

3. Your car will be seized by the most powerful person around, and they will attempt to reverse engineer it. They will either learn how to build automobiles before Henry Ford, or they'll end up pedaling around in bamboo and palm frond vehicles like Gilligan on the island.

My question to you involves Scenario 3a. What's the earliest culture/era that could successfully reverse engineer a car by studying Burt Reynolds' Trans Am?

The rules:

1. The car does not have to match the performance of the Trans Am. It just needs to run and be capable of achieving a top speed of at least 13 mile per hour.

2. At least half of the accessories must work - headlights, air conditioner, etc.

3. No need for a working radio, and any tape deck or 8-track may use your existing inventory. No need to create new tapes and 8-tracks.

4. All parts of the new vehicle must be manufactured. No scavenging of parts from the Trans Am.

5. Assume that the car is in the hands of the most powerful person in the world.

6. Assume that they are working without your help since they don't trust your accent, and that they have never seen Smokey and the Bandit.

[cdcox]

I am disappointed that the scenario did not mention Sally Field c. 1977.

['Hamas' Jenkins]

I think it would be very difficult to reverse engineer a car without being able to machine the parts to a very precise tolerance. Hard to imagine a blacksmith being able to do that.

But more than the car itself, aren't you forgetting about two important things:

1) Said society needs to be able to refine gasoline/ethanol to a purity that isn't going to blow the engine

2) How is the air conditioning going to work without refrigerant? Chlorofluorocarbons weren't even synthetically feasible until the 1890s.

[cdcox]

Originally Posted by 'Hamas' Jenkins

I think it would be very difficult to reverse engineer a car without being able to machine the parts to a very precise tolerance. Hard to imagine a blacksmith being able to do that.

But more than the car itself, aren't you forgetting about two important things:

1) Said society needs to be able to refine gasoline/ethanol to a purity that isn't going to blow the engine

2) How is the air conditioning going to work without refrigerant? Chlorofluorocarbons weren't even synthetically feasible until the 1890s.

That is why I marked post 1850.

[Hammock Parties]

I'm going to say Tesla could have figured it out at the height of his powers. So no one before him around 1895.

[Perineum Ripper]

Bandit car was racist..so I'm not comfortable answering

[listopencil]

The closest thing I found (historically) to an ICE after a cursory search was the gunpowder engine of Christiaan Huygens:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_engine

This was the late 1600's. With a model to go off of I'll say the late 1500's.

[AustinChief]

Originally Posted by 'Hamas' Jenkins

I think it would be very difficult to reverse engineer a car without being able to machine the parts to a very precise tolerance. Hard to imagine a blacksmith being able to do that.

But more than the car itself, aren't you forgetting about two important things:

1) Said society needs to be able to refine gasoline/ethanol to a purity that isn't going to blow the engine

2) How is the air conditioning going to work without refrigerant? Chlorofluorocarbons weren't even synthetically feasible until the 1890s.

Since we aren't worried about mass production or reliability, machining parts shouldn't be too difficult. Fuel is going to be the main issue along with the battery. The A/C could use a number of other gases instead of CFCs so that isn't a major problem.

I'd say anytime before the mid 1600s and they wouldn't even know where to begin on many of the materials. If you started in 1650 I would think the process would still take 50-100 years before they could complete a working car.

[Rain Man]

After considerable thought, I went with 1750 to 1799. Steam engines had been around for a while by that point, so the concept of artificial locomotion was understand, and presumably also the ability to build "vehicles", at least in the sense of horsedrawn vehicles. Trains apparently showed up in 1804, so the technology wasn't far away to build things like brakes and gauges and stuff.

I don't know how evolved chemistry was at that point. I looked it up, and the periodic table first appeared in 1869. So per an earlier point, gasoline and oil and lubricants may be the most challenging part of reverse engineering a car, and I guess that would make sense. It was probably the last part that was developed when cars were invented the first time.

So it would have been a stretch in 1775 to build a car, but people are resourceful. I think King George III would have put his best minds on it, and they would have succeeded at great cost and time.

[Rasputin]

I think the Chinese in the 9th century could have figured something out to make the Trans Am go vroom. It may explode but it would go vroom then boom.

[cdcox]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

I don't know how evolved chemistry was at that point. I looked it up, and the periodic table first appeared in 1869. So per an earlier point, gasoline and oil and lubricants may be the most challenging part of reverse engineering a car, and I guess that would make sense. It was probably the last part that was developed when cars were invented the first time.

Petroleum has been known for 4000 years, but the ability to distill kerosene from petroleum was only discovered in 1847, despite the fact that kerosene was a very useful means of providing artificial lighting at the time. I think this would have been one of the most challenging things to develop early.

Electric light bulbs (headlamps) were invented in 1879. I don't think they would have had good methods of determining the composition of the filaments to reverse engineer them.

The lead acid battery was first developed in 1859, although I don't think that would be too difficult to reverse engineer.

Rubber vulcanization was developed in 1839.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by cdcox

Petroleum has been known for 4000 years, but the ability to distill kerosene from petroleum was only discovered in 1847, despite the fact that kerosene was a very useful means of providing artificial lighting at the time. I think this would have been one of the most challenging things to develop early.

Electric light bulbs (headlamps) were invented in 1879. I don't think they would have had good methods of determining the composition of the filaments to reverse engineer them.

The lead acid battery was first developed in 1859, although I don't think that would be too difficult to reverse engineer.

Rubber vulcanization was developed in 1839.

So it sounds like your theory is that a fifty-year advance in one step would be too much. Maybe it is, but I guess I would hope that it would accelerate development to some extent. Ten years? Twenty years?

The obvious next question is about alien technology. Looking at the voting, does everyone pretty much think that we couldn't advance more than 50 years in the current day? If an alien ship landed that was 100 years more advanced than we are, would we just scratch our heads and give up? Would it shorten our development timeline from 100 years to XX years? What would happens?

[cdcox]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

So it sounds like your theory is that a fifty-year advance in one step would be too much. Maybe it is, but I guess I would hope that it would accelerate development to some extent. Ten years? Twenty years?

The obvious next question is about alien technology. Looking at the voting, does everyone pretty much think that we couldn't advance more than 50 years in the current day? If an alien ship landed that was 100 years more advanced than we are, would we just scratch our heads and give up? Would it shorten our development timeline from 100 years to XX years? What would happens?

Look at nuclear weapons. That technology is now 70 years old. The key concepts about how to do it have been public knowledge for decades. Yet there are many countries who want that capability that are struggling to achieve it. You have to have the fundamental knowledge and the infrastructure to exploit the known technology. Now, it can be argued that if North Korea didn't have any knowledge from outside about the existence of nuclear weapons that it would take their own scientists even longer to come up with that technology on their own. Maybe hundreds of years longer.

When the US developed the atomic bomb, I'm not sure the science of the device was even the rate limiting step. I'd lean more to figuring out how to separate Uranium 235, building the factories to do it, and then the inherent time it took to do the separations were rate limiting.

Even though developed countries now have the scientific infrastructure in place to better exploit advanced technology than we did 150 to 200 years ago, it might be questionable how many steps ahead we can jump.

Let's take the example of the microcomputer chip. If we had dropped a modern day laptop into the labs of Bell labs in 1950 (shortly after the invention of the transistor but 2 years before the patent of the first integrated circuit) how fast would it have sped things up? I think it would have been less than a factor of 2. In other words, I don't think that we would have had today's computers by 1983 if a lap top got dropped into Bell labs in 1950. There are too many advances needed in materials science, growing silicon crystals, material deposition, photolithography, wire bonding, doping, that would not be revealed by just being given a laptop. Those would have to be learned the old fashioned trial and error way.

If we speculate on alien technology, we can start by thinking of technology as the ability to manipulate matter, energy, and information. What if the device manipulated dark energy or dark matter? We don't know what these are. Similar to an 1820 automotive engineer may be puzzled by the substance gasoline with very limited analytical chemistry tools to figure it out and where it came from. Having the vision provided by the prototype can speed things up, but only by so much.

[mdchiefsfan]

I don't know the answer to your question, but I do know you're stuck until November 5, 1955: when the flux capacitor was conceptualized.

[Trivers]

Originally Posted by cdcox

Look at nuclear weapons. That technology is now 70 years old. The key concepts about how to do it have been public knowledge for decades. Yet there are many countries who want that capability that are struggling to achieve it. You have to have the fundamental knowledge and the infrastructure to exploit the known technology. Now, it can be argued that if North Korea didn't have any knowledge from outside about the existence of nuclear weapons that it would take their own scientists even longer to come up with that technology on their own. Maybe hundreds of years longer.

When the US developed the atomic bomb, I'm not sure the science of the device was even the rate limiting step. I'd lean more to figuring out how to separate Uranium 235, building the factories to do it, and then the inherent time it took to do the separations were rate limiting.

Even though developed countries now have the scientific infrastructure in place to better exploit advanced technology than we did 150 to 200 years ago, it might be questionable how many steps ahead we can jump.

Let's take the example of the microcomputer chip. If we had dropped a modern day laptop into the labs of Bell labs in 1950 (shortly after the invention of the transistor but 2 years before the patent of the first integrated circuit) how fast would it have sped things up? I think it would have been less than a factor of 2. In other words, I don't think that we would have had today's computers by 1983 if a lap top got dropped into Bell labs in 1950. There are too many advances needed in materials science, growing silicon crystals, material deposition, photolithography, wire bonding, doping, that would not be revealed by just being given a laptop. Those would have to be learned the old fashioned trial and error way.

If we speculate on alien technology, we can start by thinking of technology as the ability to manipulate matter, energy, and information. What if the device manipulated dark energy or dark matter? We don't know what these are. Similar to an 1820 automotive engineer may be puzzled by the substance gasoline with very limited analytical chemistry tools to figure it out and where it came from. Having the vision provided by the prototype can speed things up, but only by so much.

Excellent answer.

No way they could reverse engineer car before 1850.

You have to create the machines that create the machine tools to make the car.

Electronic components before you understand the electronic general practices? Not happening.

At the EAA airshow this weekend, I bought up the subject wondering if the Wright brothers, Martin, Curtis, and all the initial early 1910s aviation innovators could have imagined the F22.

If a Raptor went back to 1910; they could have not figured how to reverse engineer it...too much leap of technology. The jet engine and advanced materials was a HUGE game changer. Piston aircraft was made obsolete. Our WWII military technology was scrapped over the next 20 years.

If an NASA atomic powered satellite had fallen back in time to 1850, how many people would have died before they realized that the funny looking material was killing people? Or the energy conversion, filtering, and conducting circruity that was contained within?

Alien technology? If an vehicle appeared that was powered by anti gravity and control units were solid material not on our periodic table or polymer; would we know to take it apart?