Thomas Thwaites: How I built a toaster -- from scratch

00:11:22
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODzO7Lz_pw

摘要

TLDRIn this talk, Thomas Thwaites discusses his creative and ambitious project, The Toaster Project, which aimed to build a toaster from scratch using raw materials sourced directly from nature. Inspired by a Douglas Adams quote, Thwaites endeavors to create a toaster by reverse-engineering and assembling base materials like steel, copper, mica, and plastics. He faces numerous challenges, including the complexity of industrial processes and the difficulty in sourcing and processing raw materials without specialized facilities. Thwaites highlights the absurdity and difficulty of making seemingly simple consumer goods without modern industrial infrastructure. Despite partial success where the toaster only temporarily functioned, the project underscores our technological dependency and demonstrates that intricate manufacturing processes are far more challenging than one might assume.

心得

  • 🛠️ The Toaster Project explores self-sufficiency in creating a mundane appliance.
  • 📚 Inspired by Douglas Adams' writings on technological dependency.
  • 🔬 Transforming raw materials into a functional toaster illustrates industrial complexity.
  • ⛏️ Sourcing materials like steel and copper involved visiting mines and using unconventional methods.
  • 🔌 Plastic creation was reimagined using plant starches due to crude oil inaccessibility.
  • 📚 Historical metallurgy textbooks guided handmade iron smelting processes.
  • ♻️ Recycling centers were visited to source modern-day plastic analogs.
  • ⚡ The project resulted in a briefly functioning toaster with exposed wires.
  • 🎨 This experiment challenges our perception of commonplace items.
  • 🤯 Demonstrates dependence on vast industrial processes for simple consumer goods.
  • 💡 Highlights environmental and resource challenges in manufacturing.
  • 🔌 Illustrates manufacturing intricacies beyond mere assembly.

时间轴

  • 00:00:00 - 00:05:00

    The speaker discusses the origin of everyday items from natural materials and his project known as the Toaster Project, inspired by a quote from Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." He attempts to build a toaster from scratch, starting with purchasing the cheapest toaster to deconstruct. He finds that it has 400 components made from over 100 materials, so he decides to focus on making steel, mica, plastic, copper, and nickel. He visits a mine for iron, learning about its geological history, and smelts the iron with makeshift tools. Despite initial failure, he utilizes a microwave technique to successfully process the iron.

  • 00:05:00 - 00:11:22

    The speaker continues his project by attempting to source copper, collecting acidic mine water which has dissolved minerals, allowing him to cast electrical plug pins. He discusses obtaining mica from Scotland and his attempts to create a plastic toaster case, initially failing with biodegradable plastic due to snails. He opts for mining discarded materials from a recycling center, referencing the Anthropocene epoch for its geological implications. He completes his homemade toaster using recycled plastic and demonstrates it. Although it functioned briefly, it ultimately failed due to uninsulated wires. Despite this, he views the project as a partial success.

思维导图

Mind Map

常见问题

  • What inspired the Toaster Project?

    The Toaster Project was inspired by a quote from Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," about technological dependency and self-sufficiency.

  • How did the speaker make steel for the toaster?

    The speaker knocked on the door of a metallurgy professor, read historical metallurgy textbooks, and used a leaf blower as a bellows to smelt iron ore.

  • Where did the speaker source copper for the toaster?

    The speaker got copper by collecting acidic mine water from an abandoned copper mine, which dissolved copper ores, allowing extraction.

  • How did the speaker plan to make plastic for the toaster?

    The speaker attempted to make plastic using oil from plants and starches, specifically potato starch, as BP refused to help with crude oil sourcing.

  • What was a significant challenge in creating the toaster?

    A significant challenge was sourcing and processing raw materials without industrial facilities, including making insulating materials and plastic.

  • What was the result of the homemade toaster when tested?

    The toaster worked for about five seconds before the heating element melted, failing to toast the bread properly.

  • Why couldn't the speaker insulate the wires of the toaster?

    The speaker was unable to insulate wires as they couldn't source natural rubber from Kew Gardens, leading to exposed homemade copper wires.

  • What does the speaker mean by mining modern-day rock for plastic?

    The speaker refers to collecting waste plastics from recycling centers, akin to mining from the abundance of electronic waste.

  • Why did the speaker visit a recycling center?

    To mine modern-day materials from electronic waste, which can be recycled into plastic needed for the toaster's design.

  • What lesson does the Toaster Project project convey?

    The project illustrates the complexity of manufacturing modern items from scratch and our dependence on industrial processes.

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  • 00:00:15
    If we look around us,
  • 00:00:18
    much of what surrounds us
  • 00:00:20
    started life as various rocks and sludge
  • 00:00:23
    buried in the ground in various places in the world.
  • 00:00:27
    But, of course, they don't look like rocks and sludge now.
  • 00:00:29
    They look like TV cameras, monitors,
  • 00:00:32
    annoying radio mics.
  • 00:00:34
    And so this magical transformation
  • 00:00:36
    is what I was trying to get at with my project,
  • 00:00:39
    which became known as the Toaster Project.
  • 00:00:41
    And it was also inspired by this quote
  • 00:00:43
    from Douglas Adams,
  • 00:00:45
    and the situation is from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
  • 00:00:48
    And the situation it describes
  • 00:00:50
    is the hero of the book -- he's a 20th-century man --
  • 00:00:53
    finds himself alone on a strange planet
  • 00:00:56
    populated only by a technologically primitive people.
  • 00:00:59
    And he kind of assumes that, yes,
  • 00:01:01
    he'll become -- these villagers --
  • 00:01:03
    he'll become their emperor
  • 00:01:05
    and transform their society
  • 00:01:07
    with his wonderful command of technology
  • 00:01:09
    and science and the elements,
  • 00:01:11
    but, of course, realizes
  • 00:01:13
    that without the rest of human society,
  • 00:01:15
    he can barely make a sandwich,
  • 00:01:18
    let alone a toaster.
  • 00:01:20
    But he didn't have Wikipedia.
  • 00:01:22
    So I thought, okay,
  • 00:01:24
    I'll try and make an electric toaster from scratch.
  • 00:01:26
    And, working on the idea
  • 00:01:28
    that the cheapest electric toaster
  • 00:01:30
    would also be the simplest to reverse-engineer,
  • 00:01:32
    I went and bought the cheapest toaster I could find,
  • 00:01:35
    took it home
  • 00:01:37
    and was kind of dismayed to discover
  • 00:01:39
    that, inside this object,
  • 00:01:41
    which I'd bought for just 3.49 pounds,
  • 00:01:44
    there were 400 different bits
  • 00:01:47
    made out of a hundred-plus different materials.
  • 00:01:51
    I didn't have the rest of my life to do this project.
  • 00:01:54
    I had maybe nine months.
  • 00:01:56
    So I thought, okay, I'll start with five.
  • 00:01:58
    And these were steel, mica,
  • 00:02:00
    plastic, copper and nickel.
  • 00:02:03
    So, starting with steel: how do you make steel?
  • 00:02:06
    I went and knocked on the door
  • 00:02:08
    of the Rio Tinto Chair
  • 00:02:10
    of Advanced Mineral Extraction at the Royal School of Mines
  • 00:02:13
    and said, "How do you make steel?"
  • 00:02:15
    And Professor Cilliers was very kind
  • 00:02:17
    and talked me through it.
  • 00:02:19
    And my vague rememberings from GCSE science --
  • 00:02:22
    well, steel comes from iron,
  • 00:02:24
    so I phoned up an iron mine.
  • 00:02:27
    And said, "Hi, I'm trying to make a toaster.
  • 00:02:29
    Can I come up and get some iron?"
  • 00:02:33
    Unfortunately, when I got there -- emerges Ray.
  • 00:02:36
    He had misheard me
  • 00:02:38
    and thought I was coming up because I was trying to make a poster,
  • 00:02:41
    and so wasn't prepared to take me into the mines.
  • 00:02:44
    But after some nagging, I got him to do that.
  • 00:02:46
    (Video) Ray: It was Crease Limestone,
  • 00:02:50
    and that was produced
  • 00:02:52
    by sea creatures
  • 00:02:55
    350 million years ago
  • 00:02:58
    in a nice, warm,
  • 00:03:00
    sunny atmosphere.
  • 00:03:02
    When you study geology,
  • 00:03:04
    you can see what's happened in the past,
  • 00:03:07
    and there were terrific changes in the earth.
  • 00:03:16
    Thomas Thwaites: As you can see, they had the Christmas decorations up.
  • 00:03:20
    And of course, it wasn't actually a working mine anymore,
  • 00:03:23
    because, though Ray was a miner there,
  • 00:03:26
    the mine had closed
  • 00:03:28
    and had been reopened as a kind of tourist attraction,
  • 00:03:31
    because, of course, it can't compete
  • 00:03:33
    on the scale of operations which are happening
  • 00:03:36
    in South America, Australia, wherever.
  • 00:03:39
    But anyway, I got my suitcase of iron ore
  • 00:03:42
    and dragged it back to London on the train,
  • 00:03:44
    and then was faced with the problem:
  • 00:03:46
    Okay, how do you make this rock
  • 00:03:48
    into components for a toaster?
  • 00:03:50
    So I went back to Professor Cilliers,
  • 00:03:52
    and he said, "Go to the library."
  • 00:03:54
    So I did
  • 00:03:56
    and was looking through the undergraduate textbooks on metallurgy --
  • 00:03:59
    completely useless for what I was trying to do.
  • 00:04:02
    Because, of course, they don't actually tell you how to do it
  • 00:04:05
    if you want to do it yourself and you don't have a smelting plant.
  • 00:04:08
    So I ended up going to the History of Science Library
  • 00:04:10
    and looking at this book.
  • 00:04:12
    This is the first textbook on metallurgy
  • 00:04:14
    written in the West, at least.
  • 00:04:16
    And there you can see that woodcut
  • 00:04:18
    is basically what I ended up doing.
  • 00:04:20
    But instead of a bellows, I had a leaf blower.
  • 00:04:23
    (Laughter)
  • 00:04:25
    And that was something that reoccurred throughout the project,
  • 00:04:28
    was, the smaller the scale you want to work on,
  • 00:04:30
    the further back in time you have to go.
  • 00:04:33
    And so this is after
  • 00:04:35
    a day and about half a night
  • 00:04:37
    smelting this iron.
  • 00:04:39
    I dragged out this stuff,
  • 00:04:41
    and it wasn't iron.
  • 00:04:43
    But luckily,
  • 00:04:45
    I found a patent online
  • 00:04:47
    for industrial furnaces that use microwaves,
  • 00:04:50
    and at 30 minutes at full power,
  • 00:04:52
    and I was able to finish off the process.
  • 00:04:57
    So, my next --
  • 00:04:59
    (Applause)
  • 00:05:03
    The next thing I was trying to get was copper.
  • 00:05:06
    Again, this mine
  • 00:05:09
    was once the largest copper mine in the world.
  • 00:05:11
    It's not anymore,
  • 00:05:13
    but I found a retired geology professor
  • 00:05:15
    to take me down,
  • 00:05:17
    and he said, "Okay, I'll let you have some water from the mine."
  • 00:05:20
    And the reason I was interested in getting water
  • 00:05:23
    is because water which goes through mines
  • 00:05:25
    becomes kind of acidic
  • 00:05:27
    and will start picking up,
  • 00:05:29
    dissolving the minerals from the mine.
  • 00:05:31
    And a good example of this is the Rio Tinto,
  • 00:05:34
    which is in Portugal.
  • 00:05:36
    As you can see, it's got lots and lots of minerals dissolved in it.
  • 00:05:39
    So many such
  • 00:05:41
    that it's now just a home for bacteria
  • 00:05:44
    who really like acidic, toxic conditions.
  • 00:05:47
    But anyway, the water I dragged back
  • 00:05:49
    from the Isle of Anglesey where the mine was --
  • 00:05:51
    there was enough copper in it
  • 00:05:53
    such that I could cast the pins
  • 00:05:55
    of my metal electric plug.
  • 00:05:57
    So my next thing: I was off to Scotland
  • 00:06:00
    to get mica.
  • 00:06:03
    And mica is a mineral
  • 00:06:06
    which is a very good insulator
  • 00:06:09
    and very good at insulating electricity.
  • 00:06:12
    That's me getting mica.
  • 00:06:15
    And the last material I'm going to talk about today is plastic,
  • 00:06:18
    and, of course,
  • 00:06:20
    my toaster had to have a plastic case.
  • 00:06:22
    Plastic is the defining feature
  • 00:06:24
    of cheap electrical goods.
  • 00:06:26
    And so plastic comes from oil, so I phoned up BP
  • 00:06:29
    and spent a good half an hour
  • 00:06:31
    trying to convince the PR office at BP
  • 00:06:33
    that it would be fantastic for them
  • 00:06:35
    if they flew me to an oil rig
  • 00:06:37
    and let me have a jug of oil.
  • 00:06:39
    BP obviously has a bit more on their mind now.
  • 00:06:43
    But even then
  • 00:06:45
    they weren't convinced
  • 00:06:47
    and said, "Okay, we'll phone you back" -- never did.
  • 00:06:50
    So I looked at other ways of making plastic.
  • 00:06:53
    And you can actually make plastic
  • 00:06:55
    from obviously oils which come from plants, but also from starches.
  • 00:06:58
    So this is attempting to make
  • 00:07:00
    potato starch plastic.
  • 00:07:02
    And for a while that was looking really good.
  • 00:07:04
    I poured it into the mold, which you can see there,
  • 00:07:06
    which I've made from a tree trunk.
  • 00:07:08
    And it was looking good for a while,
  • 00:07:10
    but I left it outside, because you had to leave it outside to dry,
  • 00:07:13
    and unfortunately I came back
  • 00:07:15
    and there were snails eating the unhydrolyzed bits of potato.
  • 00:07:19
    So kind of out of desperation,
  • 00:07:22
    I decided that I could think laterally.
  • 00:07:25
    And geologists have actually christened --
  • 00:07:27
    well, they're debating whether to christen --
  • 00:07:29
    the age that we're living in --
  • 00:07:31
    they're debating whether to make it a new geological epoch
  • 00:07:34
    called the Anthropocene, the age of Man.
  • 00:07:37
    And that's because geologists of the future
  • 00:07:39
    would kind of see a sharp shift
  • 00:07:41
    in the strata of rock that is being laid down now.
  • 00:07:43
    So suddenly, it will become kind of radioactive from Chernobyl
  • 00:07:46
    and the 2,000 or so nuclear bombs
  • 00:07:48
    that have been set off since 1945.
  • 00:07:52
    And there'd also be an extinction event --
  • 00:07:55
    like fossils would suddenly disappear.
  • 00:07:58
    And also, I thought
  • 00:08:00
    that there would be
  • 00:08:02
    synthetic polymers,
  • 00:08:04
    plastics, embedded in the rock.
  • 00:08:06
    So I looked up a plastic --
  • 00:08:08
    so I decided that I could mine
  • 00:08:10
    some of this modern-day rock.
  • 00:08:12
    And I went up to Manchester
  • 00:08:14
    to visit a place called Axion Recycling.
  • 00:08:17
    And they're at the sharp end of what's called the WEEE,
  • 00:08:20
    which is this European electrical and electronic waste directive.
  • 00:08:25
    And that was brought into force
  • 00:08:27
    to try and deal with the mountain of stuff
  • 00:08:30
    that is just being made
  • 00:08:33
    and then living for a while in our homes
  • 00:08:35
    and then going to landfill.
  • 00:08:37
    But this is it.
  • 00:08:46
    (Music)
  • 00:09:47
    (Laughter)
  • 00:09:49
    So there's a picture
  • 00:09:51
    of my toaster.
  • 00:09:53
    (Applause)
  • 00:09:57
    That's it without the case on.
  • 00:10:00
    And there it is on the shelves.
  • 00:10:03
    Thanks.
  • 00:10:05
    (Applause)
  • 00:10:09
    Bruno Giussani: I'm told you did plug it in once.
  • 00:10:11
    TT: Yeah, I did plug it in.
  • 00:10:13
    I don't know if you could see,
  • 00:10:15
    but I was never able to make insulation for the wires.
  • 00:10:18
    Kew Gardens were insistent
  • 00:10:20
    that I couldn't come and hack into their rubber tree.
  • 00:10:23
    So the wires were uninsulated.
  • 00:10:25
    So there was 240 volts
  • 00:10:27
    going through these homemade copper wires,
  • 00:10:29
    homemade plug.
  • 00:10:31
    And for about five seconds,
  • 00:10:33
    the toaster toasted,
  • 00:10:35
    but then, unfortunately,
  • 00:10:37
    the element kind of melted itself.
  • 00:10:40
    But I considered it a partial success, to be honest.
  • 00:10:43
    BG: Thomas Thwaites. TT: Thanks.
标签
  • Toaster Project
  • Douglas Adams
  • self-sufficiency
  • manufacturing processes
  • raw materials
  • technology dependency
  • industrial processes
  • metallurgy
  • recycling
  • creativity