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

"Both interesting and amusing" according to C. Griffith. Spoiler alert: The author succeeded, mostly, in making his toaster, although he ended up making the exterior from some plastic trash he found rather than from petroleum (turns out making plastic on your own is much more difficult than smelting metal) and I don't think he managed a return spring to pop out the toast when done.Mr. Thwaites was a British art student at the time he undertook to make a toaster from the raw ingredients as a school project and in order to demonstrate how dependent we are upon a complicated web of supply of hard to refine raw ingredients. PBFT said Nice read, thought-provoking, short. We need people to remind us of the magnitude of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand. Thomas Thwaites does a nice job of describing his journey to see just how far we've come and how astonishingly much technology and knowledge goes into even the simplest product that we take for granted. A good and thought-provoking read, especially recommended for middle and high school students.My only quibble is that the author was clearly a grad student with limited time and budget. The book is short, and I found myself wishing that he'd had more time to explore and espec. and fun for the reader to follow along in this adventure Interesting thesis, and fun for the reader to follow along in this adventure and maybe realize how much we benefit from technology without ourselves understanding (or having to participate in) the science behind it. The only thing missing was how the toaster worked when finally completed. Very anti-climactic.

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.. 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. 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. "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

It's an entertaining and well-written book, and I love how Thwaites embraces failure as a part of the story, which is a reality for many "maker" style projects" -- Wired"At once a charming manifesto for the maker movement and a poetic reflection on consumerism's downfall, The Toaster Project is a story of reacquainting ourselves with the origins of our stuff, part Moby-Duck, part The Story of Stuff, part something else made entirely from scratch." -- Brain Pickings"Funny and thoughtful" -- the Boston Globe"The Toaster Project raises fascinating questions. from scratch. A hilarious, wonderfully wrought account of how hard it is to really make anything from scratch, much less an electronic device." -- Aaron Britt, Dwell"It's fun, and you'll get a little smarter, and maybe you'll appreciate our ancestors and their smarts a little