The Toaster ProjectBy Thomas Thwaites |
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The project began innocently enough, "a desire for toast and the fulfillment of that desire is totally reasonable", Thomas
Thwaites said, "yet the enormous industrial activity required to manufacture a device for making toast is absurd. At the same time, any romantic notion of returning to some kind of self-sufficient, pre-industrial past is equally absurd."
The Toaster Project is one man's attempt to get under the skin of all those slick-looking objects, to see if he could replicate global-scale manufacturing with his own labor and skills. The artist, turned temporary electronic hobbyist, Thwaites, embarked on a nine-month-long journey from his local appliance store to remote mines in the UK to his mother's backyard, where he created a crude foundry. Along the way, he learned 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 most remote locations. |
An ordinary toaster is made up of 404 separate parts
Is it still possible, in the 21st century, for one person to create an everyday household object from scratch? A graduate student at London's Royal College of Art, Thwaites was determined to find out. He selected the toaster, one of the most commonplace consumer goods. He documented all his minor failures and major triumphs in the book, The Toaster Project.
Thwaites has an amazing sense of adventure and keen curiosity, but it is his desire to explore the difficult questions the project raises—about mass production, globalization, and our throw away consumer culture that elevates The Toaster Project into something much more than an adventure story.
What did "from scratch" mean? What tools could he use? He decided that he must do all the work himself, but he could get advice from experts. The first ally he enlists is an enthusiastic professor at the Royal School of Mines who calls the project "utterly fabulous" and sketches out the principles of backyard metallurgy. At a mine that had produced iron for over two millennia but is now a tourist attraction decorated for Christmas, a miner dressed as Santa allows Thwaites to take home a suitcase full of iron ore.
In western Scotland, Thwaites visits what his guidebook calls "the most isolated pub in mainland Britain" and finds a helpful, if slightly drunk, local who draws him a map to an abandoned mica mine. When Thwaites tries to get petroleum to manufacture plastic for the toaster's case, a skeptical BP press agent informs him that no, he can't just take a helicopter out to an oil rig and fill up a jug. ("If you wanted a tanker full maybe we could help, but...")
Working with materials that humans have used since the Bronze Age, Thwaites quickly learns, as he puts it, "the smaller the scale you want to work on, the further back in time you have to go." A 16th century text provides the instruction he needs on making steel, and to cast his toaster parts he hand-carves molds out of wood and cuttlefish shells.
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| After nine months of work, over $1700, and nearly 2,000 miles of travel, Thwaites succeeds in making a home-made toaster, a strangely beautiful object that he gets to work, if only briefly. Thwaites is forced to admit that it's really no longer possible to make things "from scratch, not in any practical sense. The items we use every day are still made from rocks and sludge that come out of the ground, but the process by which they are transformed into useful products has become too complex for any one person to master." |
Home Made Toaster |
Thwaites' strangely beautiful object in department store |
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If you care to follow Thwaites' electronic appliance foray more closely, his book, The Toaster Project, published by Princeton Architectural Press is available here.
Find Thwaites' Toaster Project blog here.
Thomas Thwaites is a designer who completed his Masters in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in 2009. His Toaster Project is currently exhibited at the Science Museum in London and his Policing Genes project is exhibited at the National Museum of China as part of "What If... Beijing" during the first Beijing Design Triennial. Thwaites is currently designing and making a series of objects from a "counterfactual history of science," supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust. Visit him at www.thomasthwaites.com |
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