The Toaster Project
Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch
Thomas Thwaite
Having read it
★★★★☆
A short but interesting read (with pictures) of an attempt to make a toaster, from scratch.
Well, as best the author can after the initial reverse engineering of an Argos Value one (only £3.94) to figure out the ingredients required and then the trips and attempts to make and refine the core materials needed.
It is a fantastic, even prescient, statement, on many levels, of the real need to modify (economically and politically) things for the long-term and really get back, or just actually move to, a much more involved and rounded attitude and approach to making and predominately fixing things, not endlessly manufacturing and buying new that just perpetuates the late-stage capitalist dream and barometer of seemingly endless (monetary) growth (and resource depletion!).
A good passage
If you can’t, or don’t wish to, cut back production, then try to manufacture demand – the story of the twentieth century?
A second good passage
Ray [as of 2011, the book’s publication year, was previously a miner at Clearwell Cave but now running the site, Clearwell Caves and Amcient Iron Mine, with his son as a visitor attraction] is not a fan of the huge-scale mining operations seen in Australia and South America-the ones that made mining uneconomical on the scale possible at Clearwell. He is of the view that work on such a scale reduces humans to ants?no one understanding what their small part of the puzzle actually means. Or, as Karl Marx put it in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844):
He does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker, therefore, feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs.
A third good passage
The collision of the economy with the environment is happening now... if it were a film of a car crash in slow motion, then I guess the front bumpers would be crumpling and bits of glass would be flying up as the headlights smash. So how can we make the collision more of a glancing blow as opposed to a chaotic and bloody head-on pileup?
There’s a whole battery of ways to make this come about – economic means like landfill taxes, giving pollutants the monetary cost they deserve, more and better consumer information. The answers, I think, already exist (lots of people, many of them more clever than I, have given it much thought), they just need to be implemented. Of course the implementation is the tricky part, especially if legislation is required, and legislation is where the big changes can be made. Differing legislative environments are why the same company can operate both the world’s dirtiest nickel smelter in Siberia and one of the cleanest in Finland. We’re just in need of politicians with the gumption to act.