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Let's say you get stranded on an island with the following constraints:
What would be the steps needed to be able to generate a constant source of electricity?
Assuming:
I'd give it about 3 years. This is less than the estimate I gave here but that was a million people who spent most of their time looking for food, and needed industrial revolution levels of power. In this case, you're a smart guy who can work full time on this and has no supply issues.
You don't need AC power, you don't need to build a dam or windmill, you need a battery, and all you need is some basic pottery, and two different metals, e.g. iron and copper, such as this artifact dating from second century Persia.
Copper, iron, and clay are relatively accessible to simple stone age mining. Finding and extracting and purifying this is non trivial to a novice, but if you know geology and chemistry, you could get these resources in a few years. Almost all of your time will be digging.
You'll also need to make a wine or vinegar to go in the jar and work as an electrolyte. Making really bad wine is as simple as "letting fruit go off in a container" so I'm sure you'll manage this too.
It will provide a constant low voltage DC electricity source. When the "battery" goes flat, replace the electrolyte with more bad wine.
It puts out about 1.1V, can do several days at about 100ma. 5 of these connected positive to negative could charge a modern smartphone.
Assuming you do not need to spend any effort in actual survival:
The main difficulty will be is acquiring a source of metal.
You need metal for conductors in any form of inductive electricity generation, and to convey the electricity (wires)
However, your premise states "The island has every naturally occurring resource" So there should be native copper, and magnetite rocks. And let's assume we know where to get the materials!
Given this... I could have a pathetic little hand-driven generator running in 2 days. Or in about 3 months I can have a stream dammed, with a water chute driving a basic waterwheel, turning a generator via direct drive. The axle is just a smoothed hardened treetrunk, greased by whatever. The generator is just a bunch of magnetite rocks tied to the waterwheel, passing by a very simple coil of copper wire beaten from native copper.
The output is (very) low voltage AC at whatever frequency the magnetite chunks pass by the coil. Likely about 10Hz or slower, and under 5v.
But hey, it is electricity.
Without the native copper ore, or silver, or gold .... is there another metal ore that can be in native metal form, and is ductile enough that it can be formed into wire by physical shaping without melting? Developing a metal smelting industry from the ground up is a very,very hard and timeconsuming task, requiring a detour through pottery, charcoal making, brickmaking and more.
I've got an idea but it would take allot of work. Firstly, create a dam with rocks and stuff if there is a nearby stream/some sort of flowing water. Then make a wheel shaped object out of wood. Now use a stick as a dowel and put that through he centre of the wheel. Use bark to create fins around it and attach that to the dam. The dowel would then go through the rocks and you would have some sort of fabric from a nearby sheep (wool) or cow (leather) to create a belt, from there all you need is a way to make that turn and rub against another piece of fabric to create static electricity, I'm not sure what you would do with this but there you go, electricity!
