I am impressed by prisoners-of-war in WWII who managed to build themselves radios with very little - using a lump of coal and a sprung wire for a diode and so on. They still needed high impedance phones though.
In 1890 a big problem would be insulation without decent plastic, they had bakalite I think (I've spelt that wrong probably). Semiconductors would be out but they probably had good enough vacuum technology to build valves.
The 19th century had a lot of those sorts of resources, if you were in the right places. Faraday made his own insulated wire by wrapping it with linen or thread! Vacuum was being played with, and if you can convince someone to make a mercury diffusion pump (which should do well enough, unless you want to synthesize or purify your own vacuum oil!), you can easily achieve the hard vacuum required. Sir Humphrey Davy even isolated alkaline earth metals, so you can install a lump of the stuff for getter! Tungsten wire hadn't quite taken off yet, but the development of things I think would put some pressure on that.
So, going back further, say to the 1850s, though being specific about the place -- say, London; you could very well do some significant advances on tech. There was even an existing market: telegraph networks, needing repeaters, amplifiers, that sort of thing; and later, telephone. The quality of amplifier wouldn't need to be much (the Audion was pretty weak by later standards), just that it exists at all would be sufficient.
That at least seems to me like one of the biggest advances a single person, in the right place, could introduce. Later works (like semiconductors) depend on many things being established already, and even if you're very knowledgeable about the subject, theoretically and in practice, there's so much you'd have to do to be able to implement these things. So it starts taking teams of people, learned in their respective subjects, to start something from the ground up like that.
Perhaps an even more dramatic advance could be seen in the century before that; suppose Sir Henry Bessemer, having developed his Converter, was transported back to the 18th century. Plenty of steelmaking was going on, but the sheer industrialization wasn't there yet to inspire something so grand.
Tim
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