A Royal College of Art student called Thomas Thwaites has set about building a toaster – from scratch, acquiring freshly mined raw materials, smelting the iron ore, etc – with the aim of producing a product that Argos is able to sell for just £3.99.
It wasn’t a straightforward project…
Finding ways to process the raw materials on a domestic scale is also an issue. For example, my first attempt to extract metal involved a chimney pot, some hair-dryers, a leaf blower, and a methodology from the 15th century — this is about the level of technology we can manage when we’re acting alone. I failed to get pure enough iron in this way, though if I’d tried a few more times and refined my technique and knowledge of the process I probably would’ve managed in the end.
The accompanying art school guff was clearly easier…
So are toasters ridiculous? It depends on the scale at which you look. Looking close up, a desire (for toast) and the fulfilment of that desire is totally reasonable. Perhaps the majority of human activity can be reduced to a desire to make life more comfortable for ourselves, and has thus far led to being able to buy a toaster for £3.99Four videos from Thwaites are are available here but you can catch the project at the RCA SHOW TWO exhibition in London until July 5.
Now, Thwaites cites Douglas Adams as inspiration here, quoting from Mostly Harmless, 1992:
Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.
But as Radley Balko points out at Reason Online, this example of art school meets the real world probably has more to do with I, Pencil, a celebrated essay written by Leonard Read, who founded the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education.
Read’s point was that it is the division of labour that makes a pencil – and substantially all modern conveniences – possible. But he let the pencil do the talking:
I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding!