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Slideshow: The Toaster Project

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Anchor Marco Werman talks to Thomas Thwaites about his book “The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build A Simple Electric Appliance From Scratch.” Thwaites’s efforts – which included mining iron ore and smelting iron in a London parking lot -are chronicled in the slideshow below.

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Marco Werman: OK. Simple question now: where do all the products that fill our lives come from? That’s the first line in the forward to “The Toaster Project” by Thomas Thwaites. The book details the author’s quest to build a toaster entirely from scratch and in the process, highlights what really goes into one of the many appliances we rely on everyday. Thwaites took on the project as a graduate student at London’s Royal College of Art. He began by disassembling a cheap, run of the mill toaster.

Thomas Thwaites: I just took everything apart. When you really separate everything into its individual bits, there are, kind of, 400 different bits that have all been brought together to make this object which makes making a slice of toast marginally more convenient. And I estimated that they were made of, maybe, 100 different materials.

Werman: And the first thing you wanted to do was figure out how to make steel. It’s just one of those things we take for granted, but that also included figuring out where you could mine some iron ore.

Thwaites: Yeah, so to make the metal grilling apparatus and, you know, the spring to pop up the toast, I knew that I would need to make some steel and steel is a kind of iron and iron, obviously, comes from iron ore. So I found up an iron mine just down the border of Wales and said, “Hi. I’m trying to make a toaster. Can I come and get some iron ore?”

Werman: And what was their reaction?

Thwaites: Well, you know, I spoke to a miner called “Ray” and he was fairly nonplussed and I just went up there the next day and eventually, I kind of nagged them into taking me into the mine and we found some ore and, yeah, I dragged it back to London in my suitcase and then, you know, had a suitcase full of rock, which looks nothing like metal components for a toaster.

Werman: And you’re just beginning the project at this point.

Thwaites: Exactly, you know. I went for the iron smelting apparatus. I copied a diagram that I found in, like, I think it was the 16th century book which was originally written in Latin and it’s like the first book on metallurgy ever written, in the West at least, I think. And, you know, the smaller the scale that you want to work on, the further back in time you have to go.

Werman: Now, believe it or not, even tougher was making plastic. What were some of the misbegotten attempts you went through to make your own plastic?

Thwaites: Yeah, so, plastic comes from oil so I phoned up the press office at BP and spent about half an hour trying to, kind of, convince this guy to fly me to an oil rig and let me have a jug of oil.

Werman: And, actually, you have the transcript of your conversation with the guy at BP and he’s taking you pretty seriously.

Thwaites: Yeah, I mean, I think he kind of entertained the idea, but he said, “It would be easier for me to help you if you wanted a tankerful,” and the thought did cross my mind of, like, a tanker, you know, turning up at my Mum’s house in London. But that was kind of something which I had quite a lot of fun with in the project was, kind of, crossing these scales because the toaster is kind of a domestic-sized object, but it’s produced in these, like, vast, industrial kind of processes.

Werman: Right.

Thwaites: And trying to, like, bring those two scales together was quite a lot of fun. So, yeah, in the end, BP weren’t going to play ball so, kind of out of desperation, I thought, “OK. If I’m going to make a plastic case, I’m going to have to think a little bit creatively about what ‘from scratch’ means.” So I thought that if I’m allowed to mine this ancient iron ore, then could I not just, sort of, be mining some rock which is just a little bit newer, made of plastic, kind of buried in rubbish dumps that I was passing on my way home.

Werman: Right. You’re not really mining though. You’re kind of digging for garbage.

Thwaites: Yeah, basically, digging for garbage, but thinking creatively, mining a garbage dump, basically and then melting down this old waste plastic and I managed to turn it into the casing . . .

Werman: Right. And that actually worked. Tell us what you did.

Thwaites: Yeah, so I put together all my bits and, yeah, I had something which looks kind of like a toaster. It didn’t pop up and it didn’t have a crumb tray and I’d never been able to get any kind of insulation for the wires, so I had my homemade plug and my homemade copper wires but without any insulation. So I was actually very scared to turn it on but I had actually promised back when I was just starting the project and, kind of, assumed that I would be able to make a wonderful toaster. I’d promised that I’d make everyone toast at a night where people go to demonstrate their stuff.

Werman: How did it go?

Thwaites: Well, you know, there were going to be people drinking beer and so I had to demonstrate this, basically, a death trap in front of any audience but I kind of made sure I was wearing, like, rubber shoes and plugged in my toaster and switched it on and for like, a wonderful moment, possibly, you know, three to five seconds, my element was glowing red hot and I had bread in there and it was toasting. But then the element got too hot and melted itself and so it was kind of a beautiful moment which ended in tragedy.

Werman: But, I mean, you must have been pretty stoked still because it worked, for a few seconds.

Thwaites: For a few seconds it worked. It just kind of worked too well.

Werman: Thomas, I have to ask you, finally, after everything, tell us what your toaster cost after you’ve added all the costs up.

Thwaites: A£1,354, I think.

Werman: That’s about $1,800.

Thwaites: Yeah.

Werman: To build a toaster that originally cost $7.

Thwaites: Yeah, that kind of illustrates a nice point about economies of scale, etc. I expect people wouldn’t, kind of, be quite so willing to throw this stuff away if they had to make it all themselves and . . .

Werman: I’ll say.

Thwaites: . . . it costs that much.

Werman: Absolutely fascinating project. Thomas Thwaites book is, “The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch” . Heroic indeed, Thomas. Thanks a lot.

Thwaites: Thank you, Marco.

Werman: If you want to see what Thomas’ finished toaster looks like, we’ve got pictures at theworld.org.

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More about Thomas Thwaites’s project:

After some research I have determined that I will need the following materials to make a toaster. Copper, to make the pins of the electric plug, the cord, and internal wires. Iron to make the steel grilling apparatus, and the spring to pop up the toast. Nickel to make the heating element. Mica (a mineral a bit like slate) around which the heating element is wound, and of course plastic for the plug and cord insulation, and for the all important sleek looking casing. The first four of these materials are dug out of the ground, and plastic is derived from oil, which is generally sucked up through a hole …

The practical aspects of the project are rather a lot of fun. They also serve as a vehicle through which theoretical issues can be raised and investigated. Commercial extraction and processing of the necessary materials happens on a scale that is difficult to resolve into the domestic toaster.

Read More
• The Toaster Project website
• Thomas Thwaites' website