Copper is very ductile and has a low melting point. Making a crude wire isn’t that hard. Oiled fabric is good enough to insulate it.
Finding a permanent magnet would be hard but you don’t need one. A simple salt/acid battery is enough to make a temporary one and use it as your generator’s rotor.
Depending on what metals you have at hand, a lead/acid battery is quite easy to make. It would require some light chemistry skills to make an acid that’s strong enough though. My best bet would be concentrating ethanoic acid.
Your battery only needs to act as an exciter. Once the generator is running you can use some of the current it produces to keep the rotor excited.
Once you got your generator assembled you can just hook it up on a water mill which the greeks knew about. You could maybe even fiddle around using late ancient Greek knowledge about steam engines (see aeolipile) and make yourself a very simple steam turbine.
With a bit of metallurgy know how you can make a DC generator like the ones used in the late 19th and early 20th century. All the materials you would need have been available since antiquity.
An AC generator would be a tad harder to make but not by a huge margin.
It wouldn’t be efficient at all but imho it would be a good PoC and you could then pool up some knowledge and brain power from people around you.
The hardest part might be convincing folks around you that it’s actually more than a party trick.
I currently have three practical ideas that are quite easy to set up:
lighting with a simple air filled carbon filament light bulb.
metallurgy with an induction heater.
fumeless heating with a crude convection heater although this one might be more of a stretch.
edit: I wrote this without consulting any external ressources as it would be cheating.
Copper is very ductile and has a low melting point. Making a crude wire isn’t that hard. Oiled fabric is good enough to insulate it.
Finding a permanent magnet would be hard but you don’t need one. A simple salt/acid battery is enough to make a temporary one and use it as your generator’s rotor.
Depending on what metals you have at hand, a lead/acid battery is quite easy to make. It would require some light chemistry skills to make an acid that’s strong enough though. My best bet would be concentrating ethanoic acid.
Your battery only needs to act as an exciter. Once the generator is running you can use some of the current it produces to keep the rotor excited.
Once you got your generator assembled you can just hook it up on a water mill which the greeks knew about. You could maybe even fiddle around using late ancient Greek knowledge about steam engines (see aeolipile) and make yourself a very simple steam turbine.
With a bit of metallurgy know how you can make a DC generator like the ones used in the late 19th and early 20th century. All the materials you would need have been available since antiquity.
An AC generator would be a tad harder to make but not by a huge margin.
It wouldn’t be efficient at all but imho it would be a good PoC and you could then pool up some knowledge and brain power from people around you.
The hardest part might be convincing folks around you that it’s actually more than a party trick.
I currently have three practical ideas that are quite easy to set up:
edit: I wrote this without consulting any external ressources as it would be cheating.