About book The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt To Build A Simple Electric Appliance From Scratch (2011)
Cleverly disguised as simple design writing, this book is actually a secret and subtle philosophical text. It can be, and I think should be, read as a story about the failure of humanity to relate to, empathize with and understand their surroundings. And this failure is not just an industrial or environmental failure, but an existential one as well.It is the story of a man who tries to represent something which he sees in the world -- a task which should be simple. But what Thwaites ends up creating in the end is not a toaster, but a monstrous, ugly franken-toaster, devoid of the simplicity and ease which first inspired him. He then must face the horrible truth: much of what surrounds us is, in fact, almost incomprehensible. And if even the most seemingly banal objects in the world are, on an atomistic level, exceptionally complicated, what does that say of the more complex objects? And what does that say of our fellow man? Are we truly capable of understanding anything? Are we truly capable of understanding each other?And, most importantly, are we truly capable of making toast? Where does stuff come from? Pick some ubiquitous modern object - say, a toaster - and tear it apart. What's inside? Where did those components come from, and how did it get into that final toaster shape? Could you, armed with all your modern knowledge and technology, build one from scratch?Thomas Thwaites wants to find out. So after disassembling a $5 toaster from a store, he sets out to gather up materials to build his own version - iron, mica, nickel, copper, and plastic. But he doesn't just want to go buy iron rods or acrylic sheets. He wants to smelt iron from ore and fabricate plastic from a bucket of crude oil. It takes 9 months, a series of trips across the U.K., and over $1000 to collect the items needed to build his own "toaster". Along the way he documents his trips and the things he's learned, providing readers with equal parts travelogue, humorous exchanges with materials professionals, DIY catastrophes, and pontificating about the greater world implications he discovers along the way.My biggest complaint about the book is its lack of consistent focus. A lot of avenues are explored but quickly discarded. Smelting iron from ore got pages of description of the scratch-built furnace used, material types, historical approaches, etc - while electroplating copper from water was summarized in one page of photos only. Or, for those looking for greater worldview implications, Thwaites might say: "I learned that individuals in a society are now interdependent in such a way that claims of rugged individuality are downright absurd", with maybe a couple sentences to follow up, but not really proving the point before moving on to something else.In other words, all the people who might have been really interested in this - the DIY crowd, the environmentalists, even humor readers - are likely to be somewhat disappointed with the cursory treatment of what could have been really fascinating in-depth coverage.On the plus side, it's short and easy to read, and I plowed through it in a couple afternoons.
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Source: NPR book blog, freshest books of 2011
—Nathaniel
