I’d let that person earn a few bucks. Also gold and copper wire did exist in those times, but it was commonly used as part of jewelry. Well depending on where you are. Ideally you’re in an urban environment with administrative rule. The new languages will be difficult to learn but any Egyptian or Mesopotamian society is going to value someone who can do arithmetic in their head. Earning money from that to buy equipment is going to be the key.

I mean, would you chop up some dollar bills to make strips of cloth that are part of a machine you’ve never heard of from some guy claiming to be a time traveler?

If you can melt it back down into money after trying it, sure.

There are plenty of examples of gold and copper jewelry at the time, so people (at least somewhat wealthy people) would be no strangers to using it for ‘frivolous’ purposes sometimes.

Doesn’t whatever is in the windings have to have some magnetic interactivity too?

Nope! The coil windings don’t need to have any intrinsic magnetic properties at all. A magnetic field moving over any conductor will induce electric current. Doesn’t even actually need to be made of metal. You could technically do it with anything conductive – say, a hose full of salt water.

In fact, a lot of modern generators/motors don’t have any magnetic parts inside them. Instead of rotating a permanent magnet, you can rotate an electromagnet, which is just more copper coils with a current passed through them. And that can work as your magnet to create electricity with. That approach, though, requires some startup power to energize the electromagnet, so it’s not really suitable when you’re trying to bootstrap the very first production of electricity.

Or does it not matter because the conductors are making an electromagnetic field and the base magnetic properties of the windings don’t matter as long as they conduct? (is how much they interact with magnetic fields related at all to how good of a conductor the material is?

Yes to all of those. To put it in a (perhaps overly) simplified way: Electrons in any and every material are ‘grabbed’ by magnetic fields. When the magnetic field moves (relative to the material the electrons are in), the electrons want to move with the field. (Each electron is, itself, a tiny electromagnet.) The more conductive the material is, the more easily the electrons will be able to move along with that magnetic field. And moving electrons is what we call ‘electricity’. In a poorly conductive or non-conductive material, the electrons can’t move easily – they stay stuck where they are in the material and electricity doesn’t flow well.

(Electrons flow well in metals because the way metal atoms bond together with each other causes them to share outer shell electrons with each other. In a solid piece of metal, all the atoms are sharing some of their electrons with each other, leaving the electrons freely able to hop around from atom to atom anywhere through the material. Fun fact: this is also why most metals are reflective and shiny (when not oxidized/corroded) – incoming photons of light hit this swarm of freely moving electrons and get bounced right back out.)

Are you an Electrical Engineer or some type of materials scientist that can answer all of my random questions?

Science fiction writer, mainly, lol! But it does mean I spend a lot of time getting into the weeds of how such things work.

Did actually take one semester of engineering classes once, before deciding to go a different direction.

The slowing down is a function of conductivity. Electromagnetism means the magnet induces current resulting in magnetism pushing back. Ferromagnetism on the other hand is a somewhat rare property of some metals where all of their atoms can be pushed into the same magnetic orientation.

Disclaimer I’m an engineer half remembering this stuff

[During the physical stage], society is preoccupied with bare survival and subsistence. People follow tradition strictly, and there is little innovation and change. Land is the main asset and productive resource during the physical stage, and wealth is measured by the size of land holdings. This is the agrarian and feudal phase of society. Inherited wealth and position rule the roost and there is very little upward mobility. Feudal lords and military chiefs function as the leaders of the society. Commerce and money play a relatively minor role. As innovative thinking and experimental approaches are discouraged, people follow tradition unwaveringly and show little inclination to think outside of established guidelines. Occupational skills are passed down from parent to child by a long process of apprenticeship.

Guilds restrict the dissemination of trade secrets and technical knowledge. The Church controls the spread of new knowledge and tries to smother new ideas that does not agree with established dogmas. The physical stage comes to an end when the reorganization of agriculture gives scope for commerce and industry to expand. This happened in Europe during the 18th century when political revolutions abolished feudalism and the Industrial Revolution gave a boost to factory production. The shift to the vital and mental stages helps to break the bonds of tradition and inject new dynamism in social life.

(Emphasis mine) I didn’t mean like that, lol. They’d just find me… undogmatic, to say the least.

“One day you will be rich tech oligarchs and rule the world!”

Broth sounds like a good option