They did have gambling back then. The roulette wheel came about in the 1800's, or they could have shuffled playing cards and drew some out of the deck, or thrown dice.
These aren't "natural" as in "from the earth", but they are trivial ways to calculate random numbers without assistance from a powered machine.
To answer your question though, I'd just flip a coin and calculate a random number in whatever range you want using binary.
The thing with feeding truly random numbers to a person is that they never seem "random enough," so you'll have people rejecting a stochastic process because they see patterns, so they'll go out of their way to make it look more like noise, and decreasing the entropy.
Comments
Just out of curiosity, what's your favorite technique for generating random numbers from nature? Let's say 7 numbers between 0 and 99.
They did have gambling back then. The roulette wheel came about in the 1800's, or they could have shuffled playing cards and drew some out of the deck, or thrown dice.
These aren't "natural" as in "from the earth", but they are trivial ways to calculate random numbers without assistance from a powered machine.
To answer your question though, I'd just flip a coin and calculate a random number in whatever range you want using binary.
With a Lava Lamp:
http://www.lavarnd.org/
Or with alpha-decay:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6745217.html
Either of those work well 200 years ago? I didn't think so.
The thing with feeding truly random numbers to a person is that they never seem "random enough," so you'll have people rejecting a stochastic process because they see patterns, so they'll go out of their way to make it look more like noise, and decreasing the entropy.
"Here be chaotic bits"
I love the idea of this. Commodity hardware + smarts = awesome