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Product Details
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press; First Edition edition (September 28, 2011)
As one whose elementary school education included tours of a Ford assembly line and the production floor of the Eastern Steel Barrel company in central New Jersey, I've been forever fascinated by what happens between the factory and the retail space. In visits to pre-industrial age museums, I wonder how pioneers or settlers of any age got by in a time and place when you couldn't just go buy a hammer, a screw, or a nail...you needed to have them forged for you. A few years ago, I got hooked on the How It's Made series for the same reasons.
In "The Toaster Project", Thomas Thwaites takes similar curiosity to the limit, as he tries to make --from scratch-- a most mundane piece of modern technology: an electric toaster (a device now into its second century of evolution).
In doing so, Thwaites first deconstructs a common household toaster with a plastic case (the cheapest one currently offered on Amazon (by Rival sells for around $12. He discovers a device containing somewhere between 157 to 404 separate "parts", depending on how you count and how far down you dissect the components. He broadly categorizes these as belonging to either "steel", "mica", "plastic", "copper" and "nickel" subsets and then sets about to fabricate a working one.
The result is an engaging and entertaining mixture of science, economics (especially the economies of scale and distance in the domain of mass production) and consumer technology. Even as Thwaites explores these areas, he never takes himself --or the project-- too seriously.Read more ›
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Thomas Thwaites' book, The Toaster Project, promises a lot and (nearly) delivers a toaster. The book is an interesting look at how complex even simple, every-day technological devices might be. Thwaites uses the pop up toaster as a springboard to discuss topics from metallurgy to the industrial revolution to our ecological footprint. In the end, the book is a short, quick, and mostly successful read.
A second year postgraduate design student at the Royal College of Art, Thwaites begins a nine month 1187.54 pound sterling quest to build a simple pop up toaster. He doggedly pursues this goal and documents his way through it for his masters project as well as his own personal obsession with the idea.
In The Toaster Project Thomas Thwaites documents his attempt to build a toaster from scratch. This entails a lot of work, money, and research that produces a compelling narrative about a modern device that usually receives little attention.
The project is impractical and "ridiculous," but the author tells the story well, and I feel like I got something out of reading it. I am not sure it was what he intended for me to take away from it, because I don't share his take on the issues he raises in it about our mass consumer culture. I also don't think the project actually provides much support for the agenda he is trying to advance, and he seems at times to be forcing his quirky endeavor to make arguments that it isn't designed to sustain. Nevertheless, it is an enjoyable story. I'd also like to add that the photography is superb and the text is arranged beautifully; it's nice to see a book receive so much care and attention in its production.
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I bought this book hoping for a description of the techniques used by one person to recreate the components that go into making a common household product. I wanted to learn how to smelt iron, make plastic, form copper wire, etc. Instead, I got a book whose focus is really just a complaint about the wastefulness of the modern world. The author's point is well taken, but it's a hackneyed theme that doesn't need to be repeated. The real appeal of this book is not, as the author seems to believe, as a social commentary, but rather as the story of how a man can gather knowledge about traditional methods of shaping nature to meet tremendous technical challenges. I hoped for a Kon Tiki sailing the waters of consumer products, so to speak, but in this I was sorely disappointed. Whenever the going gets tough, whenever the author is faced with a technical challenge, he just shrugs his shoulders and gives up. Make plastic? Too difficult, just melt some down. Smelt nickel? Nope, just melt some coins. Even when he strikes upon something interesting, like the idea of extracting copper from mine effluent using electrolysis, he writes not a single word describing how it's done. In short, this book is a fantastic idea that was very poorly executed. I would love to see the same book written by someone who relishes a technical challenge and has the gumption to face it.
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This item: The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch
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