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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

There's a relevant Mitchell and Web scetch. Someone travels back in time and meets Faraday. Faraday asks a bunch of questions, none of which can be answered because the traveller is just an everyday person who has little clue about how things work.

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Armstrong and Miller actually: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6c2kyNJ3Omo

Whoops, thanks for the correction.

I did wonder why I couldn't find the clip in YouTube.

You may have been thinking of this sketch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa_hiLXLbTc Where one guy proposes a modern idea but it makes no sense to people of the past. I think this is one of a 2 or 3 such sketches.

There's a slightly silly-but-entertaining film in which an aircraft carrier goes back in time. The spoiler of the film is that one man who is left behind in time becomes absurdly rich by becoming a pioneering "inventor".

So we should look for absurdly rich people who have made dozens of inventions.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080736/

This is a great lazy Friday night film.

Right. Just make sure you don't read my spoiler comment first :-(

I believe that there was a similar premise in a series of Star Trek: Voyager episodes, where a businessman steals a time traveler's technology and uses it to bootstrap the modern computer industry.

You could also just invest in companies that you know will succeed rather than inventing anything. That's harder to look for.

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