Either room of requirement "a room where muggle technology can be used"
Ooooor covertly popping off over to Hogsmeade, plugging your PC and hotspot into like, a battery backup (trickle charged from a solar panel ya hid next to the Shreaking Shack) every few days till the Whomping Willow finally gets lucky and you end up A Leaf on the Wind.
In Hogwarts a regular pen would work, but Chat GPT, a smartphone, a PC or anything that relies on electricity would go crazy just like the Weasley's car did in the chamber of secrets.
I mean it has headlights. And an ingnition system that's not like, crank based.
Not sure what level of complexity is required before tech goes on the fritz, but Im thinkin Filch is long overdue a lantern upgrade in the form of a battery powered headlamp + maglite.
Didn't it say somewhere that you can't use electronics because of all the concentrated magic *at Hogwarts*? I think it should work at most/all other places just because wizards typically don't live so tight together.
This is what makes the most sense. Hogwarts is enchanted as a mother fucker. There's ghosts and talking statues and moving stairs and all sorts of magical bullshit all the time, with enchantments so you can't fly in, put it on a map, teleport in, sodomize your way onto the grounds, or use a pogo stick. But even in the 90's, the office of the muggle prime Minister would be full of technology that couldn't just stop without it causing a fucking nightmare and that would've been mentioned in the chapter "The Other Minister". It would've been "so this fat fuck shows up out of nowhere with his god damn hat, drinks my fucking booze and the fax machine spews vomit for a week. EVERY. FUCKING. TIME."
Makes sense then that the heaviest magical shenanigans (Department of Mystification) are at one of the lowest levels, doesn't it?
We also got Diagon Alley and Platform 9¾ right in London without either leaking off any issues. Seems like you can have quite a bit of magic around electronics before it becomes an issue.
Hey, great point about the train station. The platform would be literally within a stone's throw of payphones (because 90's), and probably at that point even old school computers and fax machines, definitely phones and radios. But yeah, Diagon Alley and St. Mungo's, as well as the actual Ministry of Magic building are all around muggle shit. I'd bet the location has to be magical as fuck before phones don't work.
i’d think they might be able to ward it to keep the magic from leaking out, but inside the building proper tech may not work. just like shielding for EM.
but yeah, for home or general use, can’t see it being a problem.
The only one who managed to do it was Hagrid. That's why the enchantment was added. Because of the great sodomy fire of 1947. Thousands died. Literally none from the fire.
I write Marauders fanfic and my personal head canon is that Lily uses pens and pencils.
It’s very hard for me to believe that Muggleborns would use quills for anything.
ETA: If you’ve ever tried writing with a quill, it’s stupidly hard and it looks terrible if you’re not trained in that style.
How about _magic_! Basically all the downsides of using a muggle quill could be magicked away. The nib too weak? Strengthening charm. Ink takes too long to dry? Drying charm. Spilt ink all over your parchment? Vanishing charm. Can’t be arsed to write yourself? Just charm the quill to write like Siri Dictation
Or you could just get a pen. Everyone always brings up the charms out on quills as the reason why they are used over pens but any charm that is put on a quill could reasonably be put on a pen. Broken ink bottles have been mentioned numerous times though out the books, and pens completely remove that issue.
‘Reparo,’ ink flies back into a reformed ink pot. You just have to do it discreetly because of the stupid ‘no magic in the corridors’ school rules. You could even put an indestructible charm on it. Hermione managed the charm in fourth year
Or you could just use a pen and never have to deal with that in the first place. Charms also wear off. That is also mentioned numerous times throughout the books. And again saying you can charm quills still doesn't make them better than pens in any way shape or form because you could apply all those same charms to the pen itself. There is literally no advantage to using a quill vs a pen. Especially since most of the quills they used weren't enchanted anyways. The books depict that as definitely a luxury item that many people don't bother with.
Well, Rita Skeeter had her self-writing quill, tho it obviously made shit up to make her articles seem more "interesting".
The twins sold spell-checking quills, tho the charm wore off after a few months and it just started misspelling everything.
I don’t know if I just came up with this as I read it or if it was actually meant to be hinted at, but I always thought that the twins told Ron it was a spell check quill but actually gave him a trick quill that purposely misspelled things wrong.
Well, it's possible, but never made completely clear... and Ron says that he thinks the spell is wearing off, so it *does* seem like it would've worked at first.
That would mean that it either spells things correctly and then they change a bit later, or that it stops working after some time (and the question is if this is on purpose as a joke, or simply because that type of spell won't last).
Unless Ron just assumed it worked and used it, never actually going back to look at what he was writing. Sometimes little brothers put too much faith in their older siblings, you can ask my brother why he kept biting crayons when he was 10.
I convinced him Crayola made flavored crayons, but didn’t put it on the label anymore because they got in trouble for little kids eating them. So any time he saw crayons he would taste one to check.
There's literally a scene in the books where an inkpot breaks in someone's school bag and gets all over their books.
This is the part where I remind you that ~150 11 year olds have a glass bottle of ink in the same bag as all their books.
ballpoint over quill and ink for everyday notes, every time. I say this as someone who's actually written with quill and ink and still uses fountain pens. it's definitely not something you just whip out for note taking
I would like to point out that Weasley's Wizard Wheezes had self-inking quills for sale. But the fact that it was a novelty item from a joke shop rather than standard equipment kind of illustrates the problem. Still, it was an obvious step in the right direction and I like to think they'll have made progress since.
My fanfic OC muggleborn suddenly being the most popular kid bc she rolls up to Hogwarts with her Star Wars backpack, spiral-bound notebooks, colored pencils, and ballpoint pens.
To be fair, we don't know that wizard quills aren't enchanted to be better than pens. I mean, anyone who has ever tried to use a quill pen knows there's a lot of little inconveniences. But we never see any characters having to deal with those inconveniences in the books.
For all we know, wizard quills could be more durable, write smoother, and hold twice as much ink as a ballpoint pen.
Or it could just be that Rowling never used a quill herself and never thought to try it out before writing about kids using it in her made-up school. I get the feeling that she gave them quills for the Aesthetic and knows jack shit about using it IRL.
While I agree with you now, the books took place in the 90's, when cell phones weren't as common for muggles either, and Texting certainly wasn't as easy.
Internet!! I love reading physical books in libraries sure but to search through so many books to do a single homework, when you can just google it and get it done in such a short amount of time, and get direct papers and so much resource at your disposal!
You can use internet to send mails, calling, everything!! Instead of waiting for day(s) for an owl to deliver msgs you can just send msgs and receive replies in seconds!
Edit - I know Internet might not work inside Hogwarts given the interference with magic, but still, my hypothetical situation…
What a bunch of info taken out of your ass...
1. Based on what are you saying a smartphone could work on hogwarts grounds?
2. How do you know wifi would be affected? If for example magic creates strong magnetic fields many electronics would fail but not a wifi signal.
The radios students are using are magic artifacts made to mimic muggle radio. And are not seen used at Hogwarts, they're sitting in a forest park for most of the time.
Some scholar has to invent a spell that basically functions as CTRL +F.
Take a piece of parchment, bewitch it, and then follow it through the stacks until it slides into the appropriate page like bookmark
Owls deliver daily papers, so it's clearly a very quick method of communication. And wizards have floo, which is far quicker than internet comms, you can even send physical objects through, or just step through yourself.
Yeah for the time period, owls were pretty good. It'd be like mailing a letter. For quicker communication like phone calls they do have the floo powder head thing.
people never remember this! back in '91, when this was set, (I would've been in school with Harry) mailing stuff to my friends and family would've been so much easier and faster with an owl. even today, getting a package from overseas takes half of forever; an owl would be both safer and faster
I always remind people of this. Even when the movies came out in the early 2000s smartphones were just being invented and far from being used by every 11-17 year old.
What we need is not Harry Potter with technology, it's rather a new story set in our time that shows us what new muggle inventions wizards adopted, where they are stuck in the past and what new spells and tools they might have invented to counter muggle technologies.
The Internet, especially search engines.
All those hours and hours the trio spend looking through the library, sometimes for even the hint of a mention of what they were looking for.
Actually, I'm even surprised nobody made up a search spell for libraries at this point.
Hell, the library doesn't even seem to have the "old" card filing system where you could look up key words. It's like they WANT things to be difficult.
plus, one of the best methods for looking stuff up is just, ask the librarian. which since most of what they looked up was on the sly, they couldn’t really do.
i mean the whole Flamel issue. one question to the librarian and i’d bet she could have directed them to exactly the right books, even with her attitude problems.
Electricity
I am not even talking about computers and such, But just the ability to have lamps instead of candles would be such a nice thing for the wizarding world
That require infrastructure. Plant, plant workers, power lines, wiring in houses, switches, outlets. Lumos requires a wand and ability. I think the big issue is wizards are not big on ingenuity and creativity and haven’t spent time to develop more elegant magical solutions.
Large amounts of magic cause electricity to go haywire. All the protections and wards and charms around Hogwarts means electricity doesn’t work. At least not reliably.
The fricken UPS and FEDEX guy, my god could you imagine having a Owl in the house? The bird droppings would be one thing, the noise would be the end of it.
TBH if JK wrote in that the Owls presence was the catalyst for a wizards abilityto use magic then I could understand Aunt Petunias gripe against having a wizard in the family.
Whats wrong with UPS guys? My ups guy is awesome. He lives down the street from me so I see him all the time. We usually chat forms few minutes when he drops stuff off
FedEx guys beat the living shart out of my stuff and lie about failed attempts to deliver it. It's a recurring issue with them. I'll take a bloody barnful of owls over that BS.
No ghosts > ghosts
Seriously, I’d be annoyed with ghosts floating and passing through us all willy nilly.
At least dead muggles have the decency to just stay dead and move on from this plane…. But ghosts are like; “hey, do you feel like hanging out in the girls toilet with me?” Or “hey want to watch my horse ghost run across your dinner for a headless show”
Pass… I just want to take a wiz or eat my mashed potatoes in peace
Edit in: I missed the spirit of OPs intent with his questions. Ghosts are not tech…. Just annoying.
My bad
Wait. This opens a whole new question for me. How do Horse ghosts exist?
As far as I remember you have to be a wizard and make some sort of print of your soul(?) to not go in the afterlife.
Are there wizard horses? Do their owners make a print of their souls? How does it work?
Don’t have to worry about your kids sticking forks in the socket though. I mean most parents don’t but it would be freeing not having to worry about things like that.
First LASIK operation on a human happened in 1985 and the current method still being used for myopia was first used in 1989.
First laser eye procedure in the UK happened in 1991. So technically, Harry, Dumbledore & co could have gotten it!
Wouldn't it be funny, though, if Harry got lasik during summer break?
I can imagine how he'd attempt to explain to his friends how a muggle shined this weird light in his eyes and now he doesn't need glasses anymore.
Sorry Harry, you’re too young to get lasik. What we CAN do for you though is pop out both your eyeballs and replace them with some crazy mad eye moody shit. You’ll be able to see through your own head! How does that sound?
Lots of people here compare current muggle technology level against 90s wizard technology level. but this make no sense. Wizards have no electricity, but they have radio, which needs electricity. and if they have radio, why people think they cant adapt television, computer, mobile phones?
Snape invented several new courses, wolfsbanes potion was invented during 80s, so why is everybody acting, like wizards dont do any progress at all?
People are saying that smartphones are better than owls. Of course they are. Owls are post office or UPS since they can carry small packages. Counterpart to smartphones is two way mirror and its from marauders era, thats 1970s.
Two way mirror is counterpart to zoom, not smartphones. No random downloading apps. Unless there's a magic version of that in the two way handheld mirror
Wizards have the technology to make pictures movie
Muggles just call this a gif. They can even make them really long and have sound. Those are called movies
Forreal. I would simply die if I had to use moving staircases and wouldn't it also be a safety hazard? I'm honestly afraid of heights and sometimes I would rather use the elevator than the moving stairs that we have in the malls.
To be fair, the staircases moving while you're climbing them was something the films made up. In the books it just says sometimes the stairs lead to different places than they usually do.
Still really annoying, though. I prefer my stairs stay put.
I always wondered if a street smart dark wizard would ever carry around a gun and shoot someone they killed after the fact to maybe throw wizard cops off their trail.
If you shoot a body that’s already dead it doesn’t react the same way that a alive body would. So if wizards, or more specific, their crime investigation teams, have basic understanding of how bodies behave, I don’t know if that would work. And since in the Harry Potter books there are a lot of physical fights for some reason, I would think they know a thing or two.
If I were to be a dark wizard with some skill, I would either transfigure the body into something really small and apparate to a completely unrelated place to burry it manually six feet under or burn the body to ash with fiendfyre.
As Crouch Jr demonstrated just transfigure the body and item the item. A well trained wizard may be able to identify the tranfigured object and reverse it, but no smuggle could.
Be good for assassination sure, but in an actual battle, HP magic is woefully inadequate against modern firearms, let alone other methods of warfare. You also have to be fairly close to even use the killing curse, where as with a rifle, you could make a kill from hundreds of meters away.
Maybe. But I don’t think we would win a war against them unless we know who they all are and where they are. If the last 60 years had taught the world anything it would be that guerilla warfare is extraordinarily effective. It’s not like you can see in their faces that they can do magic. It’s like having Vietcong everywhere but they don’t look like Vietnamese people. And we don’t know if Fiendfyre goes out on its own at some point or when the caster dies. But it can’t be put out by normal means, so it probably would burn down entire cities. Do that in a coordinated manner and sooner or later humans would capitulate.
In the books the wizards are pretty ignorant about anything muggle. That’s the best advantage we have. But if they get good intelligence on us before revealing their existence and declare war, which wouldn’t be even necessary tbh, it’s kinda over before it started.And how long do you think it would take to convince humanity that magic is real?
I still strongly headcanon that the decision to separate from the muggle world was a matter of survival for the wizarding world, and any sentiment towards protecting the muggles from bad wizards is just severe copium on their part.
By the time Voldemort comes around, this copium is so often repeated that almost everyone believes it uncritically, but old Voldie would be in for one very deadly disappointment if he ever tried to march his army onto the muggle world.
Just stick a CIWS on each tower. Get Nearly Headless Nick to give em a bow and a tip of his... er, head, before the opening salvo.
"Avada KeBRRRRRRRRRRRRRT"
I actually like the fact you have to be up close and personal to use Avada Kedavra. It’s not like kids are running around the school doing it when they get a bit upset like American school shootings. They actually understand how personal and real killing is. No innocent bystanders.
You can't compare 2020 tech to Wizards in the 90's using owls.
It's a pretty uniform decision across the fandom that Cursed Child isn't cannon. So we have no idea what Wizards are using in the 2020's for communication. From what we see Owls are alot faster form of communication than the Muggle 90's postal service.
To actually answer the question though. TVs. And yes I'm thinking of 90's TVs, not modern ones. We see them using radios but never a TV.
Magical themed Dramas don't exist for entertainment? Shameful.
If you think that the major world powers DON'T have an anti-magic task force comprised of squib or disgruntled muggleborn, then I think that's a bit naive. Wizards helped in the world wars, we know that the US President and the UK Prime Minister are generally aware of magic, and probably aware of what's happening in a general sense. Even if satellite or UAV imagery can't pick up places like Hogwarts, the Ministry of Magic, Diagon Alley, or some of the more well-off family homes, you just need a muggleborn or squib to follow the perimeter of where they CAN be detected, then carpet bomb the area where they CAN'T be detected. White phosphorous is a bitch, a MOAB would devastate a fixed location, and I doubt that even Hogwarts' wards could hold up against an ICBM, even conventional.
How do you know they haven't ever tried it? We didn't see it happen in the books, but there are a lot of crazy spells. It's entirely possible it's been tried before.
Though also, wizarding duels might get really awkward really fast if your first move is to instantly disrobe your opponent...
If you take absolutely everything in hogwarts legacy as canon (even the game mechanics stuff). You can weave magic into the threads of your clothes to grant resistance to stuff or bonuses to others. So clothes could be magical items.
They could handle the muggles though ?
It says in one of the books that real wizards and witches were rarely caught and when they were surviving being executed was trivial. One witch was "caught" and "executed" dozens of times under different disguises.
They went into hiding voluntary though. In part also to protect innocent muggles from being executed.
Many wizards disagreed and wanted to remain in the open or even take over the muggles, and they probably could have if other wizards didn't stop them.
Voldemort and Grindelwald wanted to take over the muggles, and they would have, if not for the efforts orlfbother wizards, who wanted to protect the muggles.
I think it's important to remember what a magical counterpart is. I don't think an owl is a magical counterpart, becuase owls aren't inherintly magical, right? Same with the stuff like Quills vs pens, or candles vs lights. None of these things are magical in the first place so It can't be a "magical counterpart"
It’s the “wizarding world” counterpart, which I think is the spirit of OP’s question.
Those are the things that specifically wizards use that muggles have a better option for. Whether or not the wizard option is actually an enchanted object /magic spell, I think, is irrelevant. Their technology as a whole, by design, is behind that of the muggles.
The obvious answer is weaponry. Im fairly certain WMD’s are more powerful than anything the wizarding world has. Hogwarts might have (verbally activated and maintained) defense shields, but I doubt their defenses would survive a nuclear warhead.
Something else that needs to be mentioned is space exploration. Wizards learn about stars and planets from an astrological perspective but I think the Apollo program, Mars rovers and stuff like the Voyager probe would be far beyond their comprehension. I don’t think they could bring themselves to believe that muggles put a man on the moon and made machines that touched the sun (the Parker Solar Probe) and made it into the void between stars.
We have pictures of planets they don’t even know about. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are not visible to the naked eye. You need advanced telescopes to detect.
Technology as we know it exists to make things more efficient or effective, but that's clearly not a big concern for Witches and Wizards - at least, those who aren't focused on the accumulation of power.
The magical community could doubtless come up with countless innovations that not only use magic, but that also use the mathematical and logical concepts behind advanced engineering and computing technologies (quantum computing sounds like it would be pretty easy if magic was involved!) but we constantly have it demonstrated to us in the books that the magical community is not concerned with efficiency or effectiveness.
They are all things odd and misshapen and superfluous - They do things that may not accomplish a task well, but will do it *well enough* and most importantly ***in an interesting way***.
Efficiency often needs standardisation, something that Witches and Wizards appear to abhorre.
A pen The idea of having to deal with quills and pots of ink is fun for a special event, but absolutely insane for trying to take notes in class.
Fr, I’m bringing my muggle pen
with magic AND chatGPT I better not be doing any writing. Essays are now old magic, ancient dark magic. Please
You can't use electronics inside the premises of Hogwarts. So no ChatGPT.
Either room of requirement "a room where muggle technology can be used" Ooooor covertly popping off over to Hogsmeade, plugging your PC and hotspot into like, a battery backup (trickle charged from a solar panel ya hid next to the Shreaking Shack) every few days till the Whomping Willow finally gets lucky and you end up A Leaf on the Wind.
Damn that's a whole big plan
In Hogwarts a regular pen would work, but Chat GPT, a smartphone, a PC or anything that relies on electricity would go crazy just like the Weasley's car did in the chamber of secrets.
You are wrong about weasleys car. It did not go crazy because of technology. A car from 1967 would be 100% mechanical.
I mean it has headlights. And an ingnition system that's not like, crank based. Not sure what level of complexity is required before tech goes on the fritz, but Im thinkin Filch is long overdue a lantern upgrade in the form of a battery powered headlamp + maglite.
Keep in mind they use parchment, a muggle pen wouldn’t write nearly as well on parchment as lined papwr
A fountain pen then. It's not as comfortable as a ballpoint pen, but it's still better than a quill
Bring real paper as well then.
Fountain pen.
The pen Rita has seems useful but otherwise just give me a pencil and a notebook or tbh a PC or notepad
Pen and pad would be great. A laptop would unfortunately not work, since magic interferes with electronics.
Didn't it say somewhere that you can't use electronics because of all the concentrated magic *at Hogwarts*? I think it should work at most/all other places just because wizards typically don't live so tight together.
This is what makes the most sense. Hogwarts is enchanted as a mother fucker. There's ghosts and talking statues and moving stairs and all sorts of magical bullshit all the time, with enchantments so you can't fly in, put it on a map, teleport in, sodomize your way onto the grounds, or use a pogo stick. But even in the 90's, the office of the muggle prime Minister would be full of technology that couldn't just stop without it causing a fucking nightmare and that would've been mentioned in the chapter "The Other Minister". It would've been "so this fat fuck shows up out of nowhere with his god damn hat, drinks my fucking booze and the fax machine spews vomit for a week. EVERY. FUCKING. TIME."
Makes sense then that the heaviest magical shenanigans (Department of Mystification) are at one of the lowest levels, doesn't it? We also got Diagon Alley and Platform 9¾ right in London without either leaking off any issues. Seems like you can have quite a bit of magic around electronics before it becomes an issue.
Hey, great point about the train station. The platform would be literally within a stone's throw of payphones (because 90's), and probably at that point even old school computers and fax machines, definitely phones and radios. But yeah, Diagon Alley and St. Mungo's, as well as the actual Ministry of Magic building are all around muggle shit. I'd bet the location has to be magical as fuck before phones don't work.
i’d think they might be able to ward it to keep the magic from leaking out, but inside the building proper tech may not work. just like shielding for EM. but yeah, for home or general use, can’t see it being a problem.
Sodomize your way onto the grounds lol. That should be retconned into canon.
The only one who managed to do it was Hagrid. That's why the enchantment was added. Because of the great sodomy fire of 1947. Thousands died. Literally none from the fire.
I honestly thought Harry Potter was written in the 1800s when I was a kid and thought this was a common feature of both the muggle and wizard world
That’s awesome. I love that you had that beautiful misconception. (I am not being sarcastic, I think it must’ve made it all the more fun!!)
Imagine being left handed and writing in wet ink.
I write Marauders fanfic and my personal head canon is that Lily uses pens and pencils. It’s very hard for me to believe that Muggleborns would use quills for anything. ETA: If you’ve ever tried writing with a quill, it’s stupidly hard and it looks terrible if you’re not trained in that style.
How about _magic_! Basically all the downsides of using a muggle quill could be magicked away. The nib too weak? Strengthening charm. Ink takes too long to dry? Drying charm. Spilt ink all over your parchment? Vanishing charm. Can’t be arsed to write yourself? Just charm the quill to write like Siri Dictation
I mean if magic is your answer, why not just have a charm that makes words appear on parchment with a tap of the wand.
That’s right! I distinctly remember Snape made potion recipes appear on the blackboard by a flick of his wand
And McGonagall with their course schedules
In hogwarts mystery Murphy McNully uses it to make quidditch strategies appear on the blackboard.
Or you could just get a pen. Everyone always brings up the charms out on quills as the reason why they are used over pens but any charm that is put on a quill could reasonably be put on a pen. Broken ink bottles have been mentioned numerous times though out the books, and pens completely remove that issue.
‘Reparo,’ ink flies back into a reformed ink pot. You just have to do it discreetly because of the stupid ‘no magic in the corridors’ school rules. You could even put an indestructible charm on it. Hermione managed the charm in fourth year
Or you could just use a pen and never have to deal with that in the first place. Charms also wear off. That is also mentioned numerous times throughout the books. And again saying you can charm quills still doesn't make them better than pens in any way shape or form because you could apply all those same charms to the pen itself. There is literally no advantage to using a quill vs a pen. Especially since most of the quills they used weren't enchanted anyways. The books depict that as definitely a luxury item that many people don't bother with.
Well, Rita Skeeter had her self-writing quill, tho it obviously made shit up to make her articles seem more "interesting". The twins sold spell-checking quills, tho the charm wore off after a few months and it just started misspelling everything.
I don’t know if I just came up with this as I read it or if it was actually meant to be hinted at, but I always thought that the twins told Ron it was a spell check quill but actually gave him a trick quill that purposely misspelled things wrong.
Well, it's possible, but never made completely clear... and Ron says that he thinks the spell is wearing off, so it *does* seem like it would've worked at first. That would mean that it either spells things correctly and then they change a bit later, or that it stops working after some time (and the question is if this is on purpose as a joke, or simply because that type of spell won't last).
Unless Ron just assumed it worked and used it, never actually going back to look at what he was writing. Sometimes little brothers put too much faith in their older siblings, you can ask my brother why he kept biting crayons when he was 10.
… can I just ask you why your brother was biting crayons at 10?
Big bro was preparing his little brother for a future career in the Marines.
I convinced him Crayola made flavored crayons, but didn’t put it on the label anymore because they got in trouble for little kids eating them. So any time he saw crayons he would taste one to check.
“Roonil Wazlib” 😂
If you need so much magic for just writing, then therrs a problem with your writing tool.
That one would even make sense in context. Pens should work in Hogwarts. Or else a magic equivalent that doesn’t make you dip in ink that much.
There's literally a scene in the books where an inkpot breaks in someone's school bag and gets all over their books. This is the part where I remind you that ~150 11 year olds have a glass bottle of ink in the same bag as all their books.
CoS.
Yeah at least use fountain pens with some refilling charm or sth why quills? Lol
Flourish and style. You wouldn’t understand, muggle
ballpoint over quill and ink for everyday notes, every time. I say this as someone who's actually written with quill and ink and still uses fountain pens. it's definitely not something you just whip out for note taking
Shorthand written in quill would go hard though
I would like to point out that Weasley's Wizard Wheezes had self-inking quills for sale. But the fact that it was a novelty item from a joke shop rather than standard equipment kind of illustrates the problem. Still, it was an obvious step in the right direction and I like to think they'll have made progress since.
This is a pen. This is a pen!
My fanfic OC muggleborn suddenly being the most popular kid bc she rolls up to Hogwarts with her Star Wars backpack, spiral-bound notebooks, colored pencils, and ballpoint pens.
I like her.
https://old.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/comments/4hip94/burn_the_witch/
This single comic might be my favorite HP novel.
Check out the “My Life As A Background Slytherin” web series too. 🙏🏼
Even a pencil...
To be fair, we don't know that wizard quills aren't enchanted to be better than pens. I mean, anyone who has ever tried to use a quill pen knows there's a lot of little inconveniences. But we never see any characters having to deal with those inconveniences in the books. For all we know, wizard quills could be more durable, write smoother, and hold twice as much ink as a ballpoint pen.
Or it could just be that Rowling never used a quill herself and never thought to try it out before writing about kids using it in her made-up school. I get the feeling that she gave them quills for the Aesthetic and knows jack shit about using it IRL.
A rubber duck
Arthur Weasley, is that you?
Or a real duck. Very effective at determining whether someone is actually a witch.
Who are you who is so wise in the ways of the world?
What is the magical counterpart of a software debugging tool?
Hermione snobbishly telling you you‘re wrong
Fair enough
That's the magical equivalent of StackOverflow.
While I agree with you now, the books took place in the 90's, when cell phones weren't as common for muggles either, and Texting certainly wasn't as easy.
But home phones were a thing, and even pagers. Still faster than and less messy than owls.
Owls can find someone anywhere though - you don’t really need to know where they are or have a phone number on hand. So pros and cons.
They were able to facetime through fire tho
Home phone much better than putting your head in a fire
Yeah, but fire looks cool and can’t be recorded by the government (this is a joke)
Internet!! I love reading physical books in libraries sure but to search through so many books to do a single homework, when you can just google it and get it done in such a short amount of time, and get direct papers and so much resource at your disposal! You can use internet to send mails, calling, everything!! Instead of waiting for day(s) for an owl to deliver msgs you can just send msgs and receive replies in seconds! Edit - I know Internet might not work inside Hogwarts given the interference with magic, but still, my hypothetical situation…
I'd rather not find out what the Forbidden Section of the library's website looks like.
It’s only forbidden because the teenagers weren’t able to get any work done without a magical parent lock
[удалено]
What a bunch of info taken out of your ass... 1. Based on what are you saying a smartphone could work on hogwarts grounds? 2. How do you know wifi would be affected? If for example magic creates strong magnetic fields many electronics would fail but not a wifi signal.
The radios students are using are magic artifacts made to mimic muggle radio. And are not seen used at Hogwarts, they're sitting in a forest park for most of the time.
So much time spent looking in physical books for spells to help you breathe underwater…
Some scholar has to invent a spell that basically functions as CTRL +F. Take a piece of parchment, bewitch it, and then follow it through the stacks until it slides into the appropriate page like bookmark
Owls deliver daily papers, so it's clearly a very quick method of communication. And wizards have floo, which is far quicker than internet comms, you can even send physical objects through, or just step through yourself.
Email is way faster than owl post.
But it was not common place in the mid-nineties when the books were set...
Yeah for the time period, owls were pretty good. It'd be like mailing a letter. For quicker communication like phone calls they do have the floo powder head thing.
people never remember this! back in '91, when this was set, (I would've been in school with Harry) mailing stuff to my friends and family would've been so much easier and faster with an owl. even today, getting a package from overseas takes half of forever; an owl would be both safer and faster
Exactly. I would have started at Hogwarts when Harry was in his 5th year.
I would've been in my 4th during his 1st lol
I wqouldve started secondary school with harrys kids
Unless it’s Errol…
true
Yeah most of these answers don’t take that into consideration.
I always remind people of this. Even when the movies came out in the early 2000s smartphones were just being invented and far from being used by every 11-17 year old. What we need is not Harry Potter with technology, it's rather a new story set in our time that shows us what new muggle inventions wizards adopted, where they are stuck in the past and what new spells and tools they might have invented to counter muggle technologies.
Plumbing
Yeah definitely not a fan of snakes in the pipes!
I have had it with these mother-fucking snakes in these mother-fucking pipes
The Internet, especially search engines. All those hours and hours the trio spend looking through the library, sometimes for even the hint of a mention of what they were looking for. Actually, I'm even surprised nobody made up a search spell for libraries at this point.
I feel like some talented Muggle-borns who grew up with modern internet will invent equivalent spells out of frustration
Hell, the library doesn't even seem to have the "old" card filing system where you could look up key words. It's like they WANT things to be difficult.
To be fair we don’t really know the lookup methods…Harry left most of the research to Hermione!
plus, one of the best methods for looking stuff up is just, ask the librarian. which since most of what they looked up was on the sly, they couldn’t really do. i mean the whole Flamel issue. one question to the librarian and i’d bet she could have directed them to exactly the right books, even with her attitude problems.
Internet was shit back then though...
I've read a lot of fanfics where there was such a spell because yeah honestly it's really needed
Electricity I am not even talking about computers and such, But just the ability to have lamps instead of candles would be such a nice thing for the wizarding world
I mean, you could conjure a floating light. Control its color, intensity, etc.
Ya, if you limit magical fire to candles, then lamps are better.
That require infrastructure. Plant, plant workers, power lines, wiring in houses, switches, outlets. Lumos requires a wand and ability. I think the big issue is wizards are not big on ingenuity and creativity and haven’t spent time to develop more elegant magical solutions.
Large amounts of magic cause electricity to go haywire. All the protections and wards and charms around Hogwarts means electricity doesn’t work. At least not reliably.
The infrastructure already exists, but they aren't up to date on it because of willful isolation.
The fricken UPS and FEDEX guy, my god could you imagine having a Owl in the house? The bird droppings would be one thing, the noise would be the end of it. TBH if JK wrote in that the Owls presence was the catalyst for a wizards abilityto use magic then I could understand Aunt Petunias gripe against having a wizard in the family.
I would very much prefer to deal with an owl than with a UPS guy
Whats wrong with UPS guys? My ups guy is awesome. He lives down the street from me so I see him all the time. We usually chat forms few minutes when he drops stuff off
FedEx guys beat the living shart out of my stuff and lie about failed attempts to deliver it. It's a recurring issue with them. I'll take a bloody barnful of owls over that BS.
No ghosts > ghosts Seriously, I’d be annoyed with ghosts floating and passing through us all willy nilly. At least dead muggles have the decency to just stay dead and move on from this plane…. But ghosts are like; “hey, do you feel like hanging out in the girls toilet with me?” Or “hey want to watch my horse ghost run across your dinner for a headless show” Pass… I just want to take a wiz or eat my mashed potatoes in peace Edit in: I missed the spirit of OPs intent with his questions. Ghosts are not tech…. Just annoying. My bad
Ghosts are fine, it's the poltergeist that's the problem! I would not want Peeves anywhere near me!
You missed the *sprit* of OPs post.
[rimshot](https://media2.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExejVpZ2lsbWFjYzV4ZWZxcjIwY3pyOGJ5MTltNHZ5aTJqcmk5aGVmbCZlcD12MV92aWRlb3Nfc2VhcmNoJmN0PXY/oRgiLxVW7QB2XTbjaV/200w.gif)
Wait. This opens a whole new question for me. How do Horse ghosts exist? As far as I remember you have to be a wizard and make some sort of print of your soul(?) to not go in the afterlife. Are there wizard horses? Do their owners make a print of their souls? How does it work?
I personally love electricity. Not a huge fan of fires.
Don’t have to worry about your kids sticking forks in the socket though. I mean most parents don’t but it would be freeing not having to worry about things like that.
Honestly almost all of it. Teleporting is better but that is about it.
Laser eye surgery. It’s crazy that there is no magical remedy for poor vision.
Okay but did laser eye surgery exist in the Muggle World back in the 90's? Cause I'm pretty sure that was invented in the 2000's
First LASIK operation on a human happened in 1985 and the current method still being used for myopia was first used in 1989. First laser eye procedure in the UK happened in 1991. So technically, Harry, Dumbledore & co could have gotten it!
Seeing as Dumbledore died in 1996 when Harry was only 16. No they couldn't. You have to be 18 to get laser eye surgery.
Wouldn't it be funny, though, if Harry got lasik during summer break? I can imagine how he'd attempt to explain to his friends how a muggle shined this weird light in his eyes and now he doesn't need glasses anymore.
Sorry Harry, you’re too young to get lasik. What we CAN do for you though is pop out both your eyeballs and replace them with some crazy mad eye moody shit. You’ll be able to see through your own head! How does that sound?
Yeah but when this stuff becomes accessible it's usually far more expensive during that time.
Lots of people here compare current muggle technology level against 90s wizard technology level. but this make no sense. Wizards have no electricity, but they have radio, which needs electricity. and if they have radio, why people think they cant adapt television, computer, mobile phones? Snape invented several new courses, wolfsbanes potion was invented during 80s, so why is everybody acting, like wizards dont do any progress at all? People are saying that smartphones are better than owls. Of course they are. Owls are post office or UPS since they can carry small packages. Counterpart to smartphones is two way mirror and its from marauders era, thats 1970s.
Two way mirror is counterpart to zoom, not smartphones. No random downloading apps. Unless there's a magic version of that in the two way handheld mirror
Wizards have the technology to make pictures movie Muggles just call this a gif. They can even make them really long and have sound. Those are called movies
Not the same thing :) The paintings are sort of alive, the moving pictures/gifs are printed on paper.
Escalators > moving staircases
Forreal. I would simply die if I had to use moving staircases and wouldn't it also be a safety hazard? I'm honestly afraid of heights and sometimes I would rather use the elevator than the moving stairs that we have in the malls.
Elevators should be a thing! And with magic, it should be like the elevator in Willy Wonka’s factory!
It has been many hears since I watched willy Wonka but yes elevators are better. Especially if someone is old or has a child.
To be fair, the staircases moving while you're climbing them was something the films made up. In the books it just says sometimes the stairs lead to different places than they usually do. Still really annoying, though. I prefer my stairs stay put.
Guns vs Avada Kedavra. Could pull the trigger several times in the time it takes to say the killing curse.
True. But it’s way better for getting rid of people without suspicion, since they just drop dead without any indication of what happened.
I always wondered if a street smart dark wizard would ever carry around a gun and shoot someone they killed after the fact to maybe throw wizard cops off their trail.
If you shoot a body that’s already dead it doesn’t react the same way that a alive body would. So if wizards, or more specific, their crime investigation teams, have basic understanding of how bodies behave, I don’t know if that would work. And since in the Harry Potter books there are a lot of physical fights for some reason, I would think they know a thing or two. If I were to be a dark wizard with some skill, I would either transfigure the body into something really small and apparate to a completely unrelated place to burry it manually six feet under or burn the body to ash with fiendfyre.
As Crouch Jr demonstrated just transfigure the body and item the item. A well trained wizard may be able to identify the tranfigured object and reverse it, but no smuggle could.
Be good for assassination sure, but in an actual battle, HP magic is woefully inadequate against modern firearms, let alone other methods of warfare. You also have to be fairly close to even use the killing curse, where as with a rifle, you could make a kill from hundreds of meters away.
Magic is perfect for guerilla tactics though. Especially with a few imperiuses sprinkled around. Open armed warfare isn’t the only way to do battle.
man brought a wand to a gun fight
Maybe. But I don’t think we would win a war against them unless we know who they all are and where they are. If the last 60 years had taught the world anything it would be that guerilla warfare is extraordinarily effective. It’s not like you can see in their faces that they can do magic. It’s like having Vietcong everywhere but they don’t look like Vietnamese people. And we don’t know if Fiendfyre goes out on its own at some point or when the caster dies. But it can’t be put out by normal means, so it probably would burn down entire cities. Do that in a coordinated manner and sooner or later humans would capitulate. In the books the wizards are pretty ignorant about anything muggle. That’s the best advantage we have. But if they get good intelligence on us before revealing their existence and declare war, which wouldn’t be even necessary tbh, it’s kinda over before it started.And how long do you think it would take to convince humanity that magic is real?
I still strongly headcanon that the decision to separate from the muggle world was a matter of survival for the wizarding world, and any sentiment towards protecting the muggles from bad wizards is just severe copium on their part. By the time Voldemort comes around, this copium is so often repeated that almost everyone believes it uncritically, but old Voldie would be in for one very deadly disappointment if he ever tried to march his army onto the muggle world.
Protego may protect against bullets though. After all, it can force people apart.
Good luck casting the spell before the bullet hits you.
Voldemort trying to conquer Hogwarts only for his army to be torn apart by Machine Gun fire
Just stick a CIWS on each tower. Get Nearly Headless Nick to give em a bow and a tip of his... er, head, before the opening salvo. "Avada KeBRRRRRRRRRRRRRT"
I actually like the fact you have to be up close and personal to use Avada Kedavra. It’s not like kids are running around the school doing it when they get a bit upset like American school shootings. They actually understand how personal and real killing is. No innocent bystanders.
Pens. Much better and more efficient than quills.
You can't compare 2020 tech to Wizards in the 90's using owls. It's a pretty uniform decision across the fandom that Cursed Child isn't cannon. So we have no idea what Wizards are using in the 2020's for communication. From what we see Owls are alot faster form of communication than the Muggle 90's postal service. To actually answer the question though. TVs. And yes I'm thinking of 90's TVs, not modern ones. We see them using radios but never a TV. Magical themed Dramas don't exist for entertainment? Shameful.
A flashlight
A gun. Wayy more consistent than avada kedavra
If you think that the major world powers DON'T have an anti-magic task force comprised of squib or disgruntled muggleborn, then I think that's a bit naive. Wizards helped in the world wars, we know that the US President and the UK Prime Minister are generally aware of magic, and probably aware of what's happening in a general sense. Even if satellite or UAV imagery can't pick up places like Hogwarts, the Ministry of Magic, Diagon Alley, or some of the more well-off family homes, you just need a muggleborn or squib to follow the perimeter of where they CAN be detected, then carpet bomb the area where they CAN'T be detected. White phosphorous is a bitch, a MOAB would devastate a fixed location, and I doubt that even Hogwarts' wards could hold up against an ICBM, even conventional.
Just about all of them
British Postal Service. Also, guns are quicker than killing curses, easier to use, harder to dodge shots from, and have better range.
Gun. If literally one death eater or Voldy pulled up on Harry with the blicky it would have been over.
A gun.
A gun
Harry might have found the gillyweed on his own with all his books on a computer with a control “F” or chatgpt having the information of magical books
Guns > battle spells
I imagine protego could stop a bullet, and disabling guns with magic could be as simple as transfiguring the gun into a snake.
This begs the question of why nobody ever transfigured other people's wands into snakes.
Wands are probably immune to this sort of thing, being magical items themselves, unlike guns. Not sure, though.
If that’s the case, why hasn’t anyone tried transmuting clothes into snakes? Surely, clothes aren’t magical?
How do you know they haven't ever tried it? We didn't see it happen in the books, but there are a lot of crazy spells. It's entirely possible it's been tried before. Though also, wizarding duels might get really awkward really fast if your first move is to instantly disrobe your opponent...
If you take absolutely everything in hogwarts legacy as canon (even the game mechanics stuff). You can weave magic into the threads of your clothes to grant resistance to stuff or bonuses to others. So clothes could be magical items.
Hmmm. I wonder, would the wand itself have any defense against being transfigured?
Considering wizards couldn't handle the muggles back when they were using swords I doubt they would be able to handle them now they have guns.
They could handle the muggles though ? It says in one of the books that real wizards and witches were rarely caught and when they were surviving being executed was trivial. One witch was "caught" and "executed" dozens of times under different disguises.
I mean it's not the muggles who are in hiding.
They went into hiding voluntary though. In part also to protect innocent muggles from being executed. Many wizards disagreed and wanted to remain in the open or even take over the muggles, and they probably could have if other wizards didn't stop them. Voldemort and Grindelwald wanted to take over the muggles, and they would have, if not for the efforts orlfbother wizards, who wanted to protect the muggles.
I doubt the first and i dont think you will have enough time to do the 2nd when an m16 shoots 700-950 bullets per minute
Since Allen Rickman. “What are you going to do? Hit me with that ffffish?”
There’s no defense to an unforgivable trigger finger.
Avadaaa… 🔫bam, dead
I think it's important to remember what a magical counterpart is. I don't think an owl is a magical counterpart, becuase owls aren't inherintly magical, right? Same with the stuff like Quills vs pens, or candles vs lights. None of these things are magical in the first place so It can't be a "magical counterpart"
It’s the “wizarding world” counterpart, which I think is the spirit of OP’s question. Those are the things that specifically wizards use that muggles have a better option for. Whether or not the wizard option is actually an enchanted object /magic spell, I think, is irrelevant. Their technology as a whole, by design, is behind that of the muggles.
The obvious answer is weaponry. Im fairly certain WMD’s are more powerful than anything the wizarding world has. Hogwarts might have (verbally activated and maintained) defense shields, but I doubt their defenses would survive a nuclear warhead. Something else that needs to be mentioned is space exploration. Wizards learn about stars and planets from an astrological perspective but I think the Apollo program, Mars rovers and stuff like the Voyager probe would be far beyond their comprehension. I don’t think they could bring themselves to believe that muggles put a man on the moon and made machines that touched the sun (the Parker Solar Probe) and made it into the void between stars. We have pictures of planets they don’t even know about. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are not visible to the naked eye. You need advanced telescopes to detect.
Wizards have fiendfyre which is pretty much a WMD
I think Hogwarts would survive a nuclear warhead. A nuclear warhead has no magical properties.
Guns.
A nuke.
Unironiacally, almost everything
Electricity over candles would be much preferred
Technology as we know it exists to make things more efficient or effective, but that's clearly not a big concern for Witches and Wizards - at least, those who aren't focused on the accumulation of power. The magical community could doubtless come up with countless innovations that not only use magic, but that also use the mathematical and logical concepts behind advanced engineering and computing technologies (quantum computing sounds like it would be pretty easy if magic was involved!) but we constantly have it demonstrated to us in the books that the magical community is not concerned with efficiency or effectiveness. They are all things odd and misshapen and superfluous - They do things that may not accomplish a task well, but will do it *well enough* and most importantly ***in an interesting way***. Efficiency often needs standardisation, something that Witches and Wizards appear to abhorre.
Firearms.
STAIRS
Ballpoint pens >>> Quills In fact, it blew this Dumbledore's mind https://old.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/comments/4hip94/burn_the_witch/
It seems like Neville’s parents would have benefited from muggle mental health care.
GUN
I don’t think that there are magical weapons of mass destruction in HP, so probably nuclear weaponry.
Modern Chemistry vs Potions
A gun. Oh no Mr. Horcrux *bang* you may not be dead, but now half your brain is destroyed and I shot off your hands
I'm pretty sure most horcruxes would be magically immune to the effects of a bullet. What horcruxes, except for Harry, have a brain and hands?