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    The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch
    The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch
    The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch
    Ebook191 pages1 hour

    The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch

    By Thomas Thwaites

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    About this ebook

    "Hello, my name is Thomas Thwaites, and I have made a toaster." So begins The Toaster Project, the author's nine-month-long journey from his local appliance store to remote mines in the UK to his mother's backyard, where he creates a crude foundry. Along the way, he learns that an ordinary toaster is made up of 404 separate parts, that the best way to smelt metal at home is by using a method found in a fifteenth-century treatise, and that plastic is almost impossible to make from scratch. In the end, Thwaites's homemade toaster—a haunting and strangely beautiful object—cost 250 times more than the toaster he bought at the store and involved close to two thousand miles of travel to some of Britain's remotest locations. The Toaster Project may seem foolish, even insane. Yet, Thwaites's quixotic tale, told with self-deprecating wit, helps us reflect on the costs and perils of our cheap consumer culture, and in so doing reveals much about the organization of the modern world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton Architectural Press
    Release dateMar 20, 2012
    ISBN9781616891190
    The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch
    Author

    Thomas Thwaites

    Thomas Thwaites develops far reaching design projects, undertakes commissions for private companies, as well as making work for public organisations including London's Design Museum, the Wellcome Trust and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. His work has been exhibited at major galleries worldwide, including at the National Museum of China, Ars Electronica in Austria, the Zero1 Biennial in California and The Science Museum in London. The Victoria & Albert Museum recently acquired his work, The Toaster Project, for their permanent collection. He has presented a four part television series, aired on Discovery Channel Asia Pacific in 2013. His first book, The Toaster Project, is published by Princeton Architectural Press, and has now been translated in to Japanese and Korean editions.

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    Reviews for The Toaster Project

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Does he take the harder route when other, equally valid, less difficult options present themselves? Absolutely. Is it hilarious? Sometimes. Perhaps best understood as half performance art and half microhistory of consumerism.
    • 4/5
      Interesting premise, and a quick and fun read, about the various impacts (environmental, economic, labor, etc.) of mass production. There is some science here, particularly in the hilarious chapter in which Thwaites tries to make steel (it involves a hair dryer), and a good amount of information about the tremendous amount of work involved in mining, even "freelance mining." At its heart it is a criticism of capitalism and consumerism, although, as Thwaites states, most everyone, including himself, wants the best product possible at the best price possible, and wants to obtain it at least relatively easily. His conclusions are not exactly groundbreaking by and large, but I did like his idea that maybe we should focus on learning to how to fix and maintain things, from toasters to computers to cars, and focus less on making things cheaper and more widely available. The book touches on a lot of complex issues while still managing to be enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      Think about a toaster for a second. Doesn’t seem all that complicated. Could you build one?If you had all the pieces – body, wires, levers, etc. – could you put together a toaster? Probably, especially if you found something online.What if you didn’t have the pieces? Could you make them? Thomas Thwaites took that to the extreme with some inspiration from Douglas Adams and detailed his efforts in The Toaster Project. He doesn’t pop down to the local hobby store to pick up the electronics he needs. Nope, Thwaites smelts iron and makes plastic … from scratch. And here I thought my brownies were impressive.The book’s a quick read, and I recommend it. It’s not just a story of processing copper and nickel. Thwaites touches on environmental issues of mining and waste and has fascinating conversations with professors, scientists and people who spent their lives learning how to do what Thwaites is trying to do in a couple of months.If the book has a drawback, it’s that it’s too quick of a read. Thwaites could have spent more time expanding on the issues he encounters or profiling the people who help him. I wanted to know more, but maybe that would have changed the book into a dry sociology piece.The Toaster Project points out how much we take for granted. A toaster is an incredibly complex machine with multiple components (about 400) that break down into even more components. I couldn’t make one. I wouldn’t even know where to start. Thwaites figures it out though and his toaster works … sort of. You’ll have to read it to find out the details.
    • 4/5
      Hello, my name is Thomas Thwaites, and I have made a toaster.Well, even Thwaites concedes it’s a stretch to call his bread-warming (at best) thingy a toaster, and a stretch to say he made it from scratch (he quotes Carl Sagan: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”). It took him “nine months, involved travelling nineteen-hundred miles to some of the most remote places in the United Kingdom, {...} through civilisation’s history as well, from the Bronze age to today,” and at a cost 300 times the selling price of a cheap store toaster.The book originated as documentation of his master’s-degree project at London’s Royal College of Art: “{Could} the technical and scientific expertise assembled by countless people over centuries {be} replicated by me in the nine months that I had available”? He begins by reverse engineering the cheapest toaster he could find (hoping it would also be the simplest) into 157 parts, then pares the materials to steel, mica, plastic, copper, nickel.I’ll travel to a mine where iron ore is found, collect some ore, somehow extract the iron myself, and then somehow change it into steel. The same for the mica, copper, and nickel. I’ll need to get hold of some crude oil from which to refine the molecules for the plastic case.Through text and photos and with curiosity, humor, and digressions (into chemistry, geology, and the history of mining, metallurgy and plastics technology), he records his failures and successes -- among them, smelting ore into iron in his mother’s microwave; considering (and wisely re-considering) polymerizing propylene gas into plastic using a pressure cooker bought on eBay; considering plastic bottles from a recycling dump -- after all, geologists are evaluating our time as the beginning of a new epoch (“Anthropocene”) and so a dump is a sort of mine, yes? Through it all, he comes to realize that “a methodology from the sixteenth century is about the level of technology we can manage when we’re working alone.”Thwaites’ coverage is uneven (his thoroughness and perseverance decrease from the project’s early to late stages) and it feels like a book calls for a bit more flesh than a Master’s document. The final chapter (“Construction”) essentially abandons the toaster in favor of a cautionary essay on the environmental costs of cheap consumerism; it’s not an unwelcome segue, just completely jarring. But I enjoyed Thwaites’ concept and voice so much that I excuse what would be flaws as quibbles here. It’s an exploratory, very fast, very fun read.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)
    • 3/5
      “Is a microwave anything more than a glorified fire? Is it fundamentally different?”
      —“The Toaster Project,” Thomas Thwaites, 76

      I thought this book would be quick and disposable. I was half right. I started and finished this yesterday in my quest to read all the books I own but don’t think I’ll want to keep hold of, in order to clean my overflowing bookshelf (and tables, and shelves, and floor). I quite enjoyed it, and don’t think I’ll be able to get rid of it just yet.
      It wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination (Thwaites builds a toaster but does not try toasting in it, for example) but it was charmingly designed, a pretty snapshot of late 2000s. The mixed format, the font choice, the interspersed photos, and the prose itself took me right back to what I used to love about Wired magazine. It’s fresh, it’s an interesting story about someone who chooses an odd project and tenaciously follows it through, thinking out each step and working around obstacles. The bits of history, theory, and talk about how to fit our lifestyles into the world we live in (and the crises we’ve created) were especially interesting to me.
      This book’s shortcomings were likely a result of its framing. It really did read like a graduate project. If the author had not had a deadline of graduation, he might have completed his project better. If he’d had more experience or wisdom when framing his goals, and maybe more resources and professionals instead of quite so much press coverage, he might have been able to incubate the project longer, bring it to better fruition, get into a little bit more about the manufacturing process as it is and as it could be. This was worth the hour and a half. It’s not a full exploration of the topic but doesn’t claim to be.

    Book preview

    The Toaster Project - Thomas Thwaites

    Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.

    —Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless (1992)

    For Merle, Bette,Vito & Felix

    Published by

    Princeton Architectural Press

    37 East 7th Street, New York, NY 10003

    For a free catalog of books call 1-800-722-6657

    Visit our website at www.papress.com

    © 2011 Thomas Thwaites

    All rights reserved

    14 13 12 11 4 3 2 1 First edition

    No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

    Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

    Editor: Sara Bader

    Designer print edition: Paul Wagner

    Special thanks to: Bree Anne Apperley, Nicola Bednarek Brower, Janet Behning, Fannie Bushin, Megan Carey, Becca Casbon, Carina Cha, Tom Cho, Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Russell Fernandez, Jan Haux, Linda Lee, John Myers, Katharine Myers, Margaret Rogalski, Dan Simon, Andrew Stepanian, Jennifer Thompson, Joseph Weston, and Deb Wood of Princeton Architectural Press

    —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Thwaites, Thomas, 1980–

    The toaster project, or A heroic attempt to build a simple electric

    appliance from scratch / Thomas Thwaites. — 1st ed.

    p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references.

    ISBN 978-1-56898-997-6 (alk. paper)

    ISBN 978-1-61689-119-0 (digital)

    1. Thwaites, Thomas, 1980—Themes, motives. 2. Manufactures—Miscellanea. I. Title. II. Title: Heroic attempt to build a simple electric appliance from scratch.

    NK1447.6.T49A35 2011

    683'.83—dc22

    2011006094

    Foreword

    by David Crowley

    Where do the products that fill our lives come from? China is, of course, the standard answer to this question. The dragon economy’s mammoth factories are high in our consciousness, drawing the attention of environmentalists worried about the effects of breakneck industrialisation and Western politicians troubled about competition.

    But China is an inadequate answer. Where do our things really come from? What lies behind the smooth buttons on your mobile phone or the elegant running shoes on your feet? What is involved in extracting and processing the materials that give themselves up from the earth so reluctantly? Where does the copper in your Made in China kettle come from? Were the electronic components and integrated circuits in your TV remote control assembled by machine or by hand? And what exactly has been integrated in that circuit anyway?

    We rarely ask these kinds of questions. Perhaps the nature of our consumer culture makes us averse to them. Consumer goods play a clever game of hide and show with us: they call our attention, promising to satisfy our wants. Yet, at the same time, they veil their origins. Appearing to have no history or past, they materialise on the shelves of our shops as if by magic. This is what Walter Benjamin described as the phantasmagoria of commodity culture. Modern societies, it seems, not only forget the material and practical origins of the commodities they consume, they seem to have elevated them to minor deities.

    In The Toaster Project Thomas Thwaites set himself the task of making one of the most commonplace consumer goods from scratch. This meant not assembling this modest appliance from other existing components but extracting and processing the materials from which the parts of a toaster are made. This book records his major failures and minor triumphs.

    Thwaites begins his mission by dismantling the cheapest toaster on sale in the shops. This is an exercise in reverse engineering, the dark art practiced by military engineers trying to learn enemy secrets and copyright lawyers attempting to track down patent infringements. Thwaites’s project rapidly becomes another kind of reverse engineering. Acting alone and eschewing the armoury of techniques available to modern industry, he finds himself in the position of late-medieval man with a limited repertoire of skills and expertise. His most effective guide to the task of smelting iron from ore is, for instance, not the latest issue of International Journal of Material Sciences but De re metallica, a sixteenth-century treatise.

    Modern myths of omnipotence come to seem like hubris when Thwaites is defeated by the task of smelting metals, something first practiced eight thousand years ago. We know more now, don’t we? We are more expert than our ancestors, aren’t we? Yet, at the same time, we are also reliant on the knowledge they produced. This is pointed out by the philosopher Michel Serres, in Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (1995), when he asks us to consider a new car:

    It is a disparate aggregate of scientific and technical solutions dating from different periods. One can date it component by component: this part was invented at the turn of the century, another, ten years ago, and Carnot’s cycle is almost two hundred years old. Not to mention that the wheel dates back to neolithic times. The ensemble is only contemporary by assemblage, by its design, its finish, sometimes only by the slickness of the advertising surrounding it.

    Submerged in our toasters are layers of hard-won and deeply practical knowledge—if only we could tap it.

    In the spirit of many recent endeavours to limit the techno euphoria of twenty-first-century modernity, Thwaites set some sharp restrictions on his project. Famously, Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg called for filmmakers to return to first principles in their Vow of Chastity. The obligation to shoot on-site with actors, using natural sound and handheld cameras, would, they argued, ensure a cinematic purity that has been lost in the age of CGI (computer-generated imagery) and lowbrow cinema. Thwaites’s particular holy vows seem simple—I must make all the parts of my toaster from scratch and I must make my toaster myself—but like most rules, they require interpretation. Making a toaster on his own means not employing other people, but in the world today, can anyone ever really be entirely independent, forgoing the expertise and services of others? Surely that’s the lonely territory of antimodern hermits like Theodore Kaczynski, author of another vow of chastity, The Unabomber Manifesto. The Toaster Project—over time—becomes a social one: in the course of his quest, Thwaites makes willing conscripts of professors, press officers, and even amiable drunks.

    In one regard, Thwaites’s Toaster Project seems closer in spirit to von Trier’s Five Obstructions (2003) than the Vow of Chastity. In this documentary the Danish filmmaker set his friend and mentor, Jørgen Leth, the task of filmmaking under five impossible conditions. Failure was guaranteed, but what made the project worthwhile was Leth’s resourcefulness and imagination (as well as his attempts to stretch the rules). Making a toaster from scratch is surely an impossible task, but not a pointless one. Thwaites’s project reveals much about the organisation of the modern world, not least the extent to which Britain’s industrial capacity has been dismantled. The country’s mines, foundries, and factories have become, it seems, another form of phantasmagoria.

    Preface

    Hello, my name is Thomas Thwaites, and I have made a toaster.

    It took nine months, involved travelling nineteen hundred miles to some of the most remote places in the United Kingdom, and cost me £1187.54 ($1837.36). This is clearly rather a lot of time, effort, and money expended for just an electric toaster, but when I say, I have made a toaster, I mean really made it, literally from the ground up; starting by digging up the raw materials and ending with an object that Argos sells for only £3.94 ($6.10).

    Argos Spring/Summer 2009 catalog

    Actually, this is just a version of the truth. An alternative version would be that I tried and failed to make a toaster. That’s not to say I

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