The Past is not Fun

I followed a link this morning to take a quiz. Yes, I know. I am a stereotype.

But here's the thing: it was professionally relevant. No, really.

The quiz starts from the position that while we may think we know something about today's technology, in fact we know little. So it asks you questions related to how certain useful inventions (like vulcanized rubber and refrigeration) are produced.

I scored 70%, which is apparently enough to get me from the 17th to the 19th century, technologically speaking.

Of course, I know little about things like steel. The reason I did ok on the quiz is that I know a little bit about mining and raw materials in the 18th and 19th centuries. In other words, I know the kinds of things that men like Carnegie and Rockefeller were looking for and then using. From there, it wasn't too hard to deduce what things must have been component parts of the technologies they pioneered.

Anyway, it's a bit of fun, especially for those of us who sometimes imagine the past. I'd love it if they would make a new quiz that asked about technologies useful in the past. Because the whole premise of going backward is that you can exploit your knowledge of what we have now. But to survive the past, one would need to know all kinds of things we have forgotten...