The Toaster Project

What would it take to make a toaster from scratch? Actually. From. Scratch. How would you collect the raw ore to smelt into metal? Could you make your own plastic? What even is in a capacitor? As a design school final project which later got turned into this book, Thwaites attempts to answer these questions, which of course ends in the worst toaster you’ve ever seen (but it does get hot!) and leads him to reflect on modern supply chains, interconnectedness, externalities, and how the heck the cheapest toaster at the store is less than £5.

I’ve had this book recommended to me many times by people in the synthetic cell engineering field because it is such a strong representation of how we need to ‘build up the tech tree’ underlying cell-like systems. Just as Thwaites quickly discovers that there’s no way he’s going to be able to process crude oil into polypropylene in his apartment and has to resort to ‘mining’ it from a garbage pile, us synthetic biologists are currently stuck ‘mining’ living systems for parts rather than having the sophisticated technology required to build useful components from scratch. The message is effective, whatever technology it is that you want to build, whether it’s cells or toasters, powerful, cheap and efficient technology comes from developing supply chains and advanced manufacturing. He gets told, page after page, that he can’t make the thing he wants and ends up jury-rigging something hilariously bad that kinda gets the job done. We rely on a very deep tech stack and boostrapping modern technology from the stone age would take a long while indeed.

My attempt to make a toaster has shown me just how reliant we all are on everyone else in the world. Though there’s romance in that idea of self-sufficiency and living off the land, there’s also absurdity. There is no turning back the clock to simpler times—not without mass starvation anyway.

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It’s also just good reading. Thwaites has a great sense of humor and a twinkle in his eye as he tells stories of going through some things blissfully unaware of what he’s getting into.

Having both been born and raised in London, following a map without roads is not familiar to us. Things like deciding whether something is a stream and therefore shown on the map, or merely a long puddle don't come to us naturally (we work this out after diligently following several long puddles). The major concern is that if we don’t turn around and head back soon we will face the steep and rocky descent in the dark. This would not be a good idea, as the only lights we’ve brought with us are a free torch app on my iPhone (it turns the screen on white) and a promotional pen that lights up, which Simon got at work.

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Plus, it’s a fascinating look not that far back in time to when iPhones didn’t have flashlights, cold-calling wasn’t assumed to be a scam, and the UK was still in the EU. There are so many moments of human connection in the book that feel like they wouldn’t be possible today, so it evokes a certain nostalgia for a time that I just barely remember.

And then there’s the economics of it all that the scientists who recommend the book always seem to gloss over. Thwaites isn’t an economist, he’s a design masters student, but even he can see that there’s something off in the sub-£5 pricetag on the toaster he disassembles as a blueprint. Who’s eating the costs so that English consumers can have a cheap toaster and presumably some merchants can make a few bucks along the way? Which streams were polluted? Who hand-soldered the contacts in presumably less-than-cushy conditions? The delivery is somewhat moralizing and preachy, but his railing against consumerism and externalities at the ends comes from the heart. It doesn’t feel like the reason for the book, or an agenda, but an honest expression of the realizations he comes to after trying to be a one-man supply chain. Reduce, reuse, recycle, if you will permit me to also preach a popular slogan from that era for a bit.