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I, Toaster, and good luck to you
I'm Thomas Thwaites and I'm trying to build a toaster, from scratch - beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99.
http://www.thetoasterproject.org/
And how did he smelt the iron ore into steel? He used a microwave.
For the pointer I thank The Browser and also Andrew Sullivan.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 28, 2009 at 06:21 PM in Games | Permalink
Comments
Why didn't he forge the iron with homemade charcoal (wood, fire, sand), that's pretty easy and he could have stuck with the I did it all from scratch theme. One tip for do-it-yourselfers is to look at pre-indurstrial methods which require vastly less specialization.
Posted by: nelsonal at Jun 28, 2009 7:46:56 PM
This might very well be the most important kind of way to explain capitalism to arty types. The majesty of the distributed supply chain (as noted long ago by Hayek) is just not appreciated till you start trying to make things yourself. Reminds me also of "no one can make a pencil".
Posted by: asdf at Jun 28, 2009 8:54:07 PM
Radley Balko's critique in Reason: http://www.reason.com/news/show/134322.html
Posted by: Mitch Berkson at Jun 28, 2009 9:34:31 PM
This reminds me of a similar project to make a suit with materials located less than 100 miles from Philadelphia (the home of the project): http://www.wired.com/culture/design/news/2007/03/100milesuit0330 . It took about as much effort.
Posted by: Bill Goffe at Jun 28, 2009 9:36:40 PM
Balko's article is quite good. The example I use is that the all-wood console on which I put my 42 inch TV costs about twice what the TV costs. And while with a few years of training I might possibly make a passable imitation of the console, I could never, in several lifetimes, fabricate an LCD HDTV.
Posted by: Jonathan Falk at Jun 28, 2009 10:24:09 PM
I greatly appreciate Thwaite's response to Balko's article. I shivered when I saw the link to it, however, I was happily surprised that the artist did not actually try to argue that a human could posses all the knowledge and ability to successfully build a toaster. If anything, Thwaite did not want to be vilified as your typical economically illiterate eco-artist. You never know what you are going to get with the "anti commerce" crowd these days. They are liable to say anything, no matter how poor the economic reasoning behind the arugment.
Posted by: John Pertz at Jun 28, 2009 11:41:50 PM
It's a good thing he isn't attempting a woolen coat or a pencil, that would be nearly impossible.
Posted by: azmyth at Jun 29, 2009 6:44:36 AM
The toaster seems impossible to me. But it seems to have been finished; be interesting to see what it looks like.
Posted by: bbartlog at Jun 29, 2009 9:46:13 AM
If he is allowed to use a microwave what's the point of this experiment?
Also, I think it would be more interesting to start with mined, refined metal and go from there. It would be still be quite challenging. He can pretend he went to the village blacksmith or something.
Posted by: Andy at Jun 29, 2009 10:40:51 AM
Be invaluable if the project were to describe real world ways to make IR basics from scratch, furnaces and irons and pneumatic pumps and such. Maybe even a solar cooker or some textile or water supply (scale a charcoal sock filter for a town), sewage basics; stuff to leave as a blueprint for the other side of the next Ice Age.
This project is pointless. Isn't it dangerous to mine minerals without modern anti-exposure and mine collapse equipment. Biosphere inhabitants got injured from unfamiliar manual labour right off the bat.
Posted by: Phillip Huggan at Jul 1, 2009 12:42:05 AM
There are blueprints for radio array antannae equipment you can make from scratch. Maybe some homemade fuel cells could be exported to developing world. Y'know, something useful.
Posted by: Phillip Huggan at Jul 1, 2009 12:44:18 AM
There's a magazine, Make, a kind of hipped-up, hopped-up DIY journal that shows all kinds of weird projects. Few of these "start from scratch" but they've featured some steampunk stuff and other retro-manufacturing endeavors.
Posted by: srp at Jul 2, 2009 2:38:06 PM
