This is actually a long-running plot thread in Safe Havens: The boy called here “Leo” is also, in his other time and place, going to be Leonardo da Vinci. His education in science and technology as a youth in the modern world will underlie his great talents in the 15th and 16th Centuries.
Does anyone else here look at that and think, “Oh yeah, I remember that speculation coming up in The Door Into Summer!“? That 1956/7 novel by R.A. Heinlein involved quite a bit of plot interactions in different time periods, mostly by means of cold sleep, but with a smidgen of actual time-machine travel. The narrator tracks down an eccentric inventor in his hermitage, and learns about his device. When loaded with equal masses on its two pans, it can send them into other times, one to the past and one to the future by equal time-intervals. He extracts this recollection from the inventor:
The narrator does manage to get sent back from 2001 to 1970 (both of which, I remind you, were part of the unclear future when the book was published). After some plot-heavy manipulations, towards the end of the story he reflects:
Comics I Don't Understand 
It’s amusing to think of Leonardo da Vinci as a time traveler, and I like both Safe Havens and The Door into Summer. Realistically, however, da Vinci got too many things wrong to think that he could have lived in contemporary times. For example, he specifically rejected the possibility that the tides might be associated with the moon and speculated that they might be caused by the breath of a huge underwater creature. Nor did his flying machine look like something that might have been drawn by someone who had seen airplanes. The most you could plausibly imagine is that he could have talked with a time traveler, although he misunderstood much of what the time traveler said.
Yeah, a modern scientist or engineer wouldn’t investigate flapping-wing designs for aircraft. It wasn’t until Bernoulli developed his theories and equations centuries later that the possibilities of fixed-wing aircraft
Plus Leonardo was a skilled painter not an engineer who knew architectural drawing.
Huh. I’ve read Door Into Summer several times, and don’t recall that at all. Obviously it’s time for a reread…
“The most you could plausibly imagine is that he could have talked with a time traveler, although he misunderstood much of what the time traveler said.”
Ah, the Indiana Jones theory.
Yes, I remember the story of Leonard Vincent…
The problem is that “Da Vinci” wasn’t Leonardo last name it was is provenance, as it means “Leonardo from Vinci”, Vinci is a small town near Florence.
G
Leonardo was a time traveler was a not uncommon device in mid-20th century SF. It was only a throwaway bit in Door into Summer. Manly Wade Wellman beat Heinlein by a dozen years with his novel Twice in Time, where it was the primary plot.
Or did Wellman travel forward in time and steal Heinlen’s idea?
I think if I could time-travel, I’d find it hard to resist going a week forward, then returning and buying a lottery ticket…
But it is an interesting thought experiment, to either pick a past time to go to where (or is it when?) you could exploit what science/tech/art you know, or if given a time and place, what transferable skills and knowledge would you wish upon yourself (e.g. to be a virtuoso violinist with expert in-depth knowledge of Vivaldi if you’re off to mid-C17th Europe).
Transferring wealth/assets backwards is an interesting problem.
@Mikep, that makes me think of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. (In a junior high production of a play based on the story, I played Clarence!)
In The Door into Summer, for the one leap we see dramatized — the narrator jumping back from 2001 to 1970 — he faces the transfer of money problem you mention, an d handles it by buying gold and wrapping the gold wire around his middle as a belt.
There’s a classic SF time travel story, “Compounded Interest” by Mack Reynolds, which features investing through the centuries. Mysterious representatives started it all in Venice with some gold coins, and someone pops in every 100 years for new instructions.
The Mack Reynolds story is here: https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v011n02_1956-08_PDF/page/n93/mode/2up
Personally, I find Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” to be the ultimate time travel story: https://gist.github.com/defunkt/759182/ad44c6135d168ae54503a281bb7e1a24c6c2ea0c
Phil, when I wrote a term paper about time-travel stories, after a lot of hair-splitting and categorizing, in a central category of work that seriously engaged with the paradoxes and such, I had three that I took up in detail. There were two stories by Heinlein: “All You Zombies” the one you point out, and also “By His Bootstraps”. And Asimov’s novel The End of Eternity which for me at that time (erm, 1969 or so) was pretty much the last word on that.
Brian in STL @9: There’s a real-life counterpart to the compound interest story. Benjamin Franklin’s will provided 1,000 pounds sterling each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, with instructions that it be lent out at interest to young tradesmen. After 100 years, 3/4 of the current value was given to each city with the remainder lent out at interest. In 1990, the remainder was given to the cities, $850,000 in the case of Philadelphia.
Speaking of SF and trains, I just finished an odd book called Night Train, by David Quantick. It’s of the “what the hell is going on” genre. A young woman wakes up on a moving train, without much memory of anything. She is determined to make it to the front of the train. The cars are filled with many odd things, including one filled with dead people. She picks up a couple of strange companions along the way.
I vaguely recall a sci-fi story (possibly by Heinlein or Asimov) in which a scientist had developed a time-travel teleportation device, but he could not control it: the destination was always downtown (close to a butcher shop), some years (or decades) in the past (there was some sort of return mechanism, but I forget how that worked). He became despondent, because he could not see any use for such a limited purpose device, but his wife was thrilled, and immediately took a trip to buy some steak (which was much cheaper in the past than it was in the present time).
So thanks for the link to Mack Reynolds’ “Compounded Interest”. It just struck me that he made a mistake, and I had to just now go and re-read the ending to confirm it:
**SPOILERS**
In his final appearance, he reveals who “Mr. Smith” is and what his purpose is, and loops the causality together, that the money raised was to enable the time travel in the first place, revealing that Shirey, aka “Smith”, would now take the money to make the attempt, which indicates that this version of Mr. Smith is not the last appearance of the same one we’d been following since his first visit to 14th century Venice, but that this is in fact the first appearance of Mr. Smith, before he ever time travelled. But that makes no sense! He claims to have the authentication papers from the last visit in 1900 — how would he have gotten them? How would he even know of this group and its purpose? He can’t be the pre-time-travel Smith! This has to be the last visit of the time travelling Smith, who will now secure the money and give it to his ignorant pre-time-travel self to start the whole thing off, but the version depicted has to know that time travel works, because he has to have time travelled!
If you’re going to the past to buy steak you’d better check the dates on your money. Don’t try to spend a 2022 bill in 2018.
I vaguely recall a sci-fi story (possibly by Heinlein or Asimov)
“The Good Provider” by Marion Gross.
I also determined that “Paste Without Formatting” is available for me from the context menu.
@ Brian – Thanks for the correction and for tracking that down. I have no idea where (nor when) I read it, but it must have been in some anthology.
MiB: If you’re going to the past to buy steak you’d better check the dates on your money. Don’t try to spend a 2022 bill in 2018.
Yeah, in the story the wife sat down and went through her money before going. It helped that she jumping back to the Depression. With coins it’s much easier to find ones that are 20 years old.
Kilby: I have no idea where (nor when) I read it, but it must have been in some anthology.
It was anthologized a few times, notably one of the Groff Conklin collections.