The Toaster Project

Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch

Thomas Thwaites

• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781616891190
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

"Hello, my name is Thomas Thwaites, and I have made a toaster." So begins The Toaster Project, the author's nine-month-long journey from his local appliance store to remote mines in the UK to his mother's backyard, where he creates a crude foundry. Along the way, he learns that an ordinary toaster is made up of 404 separate parts, that the best way to smelt metal at home is by using a method found in a fifteenth-century treatise, and that plastic is almost impossible to make from scratch. In the end, Thwaites's homemade toaster—a haunting and strangely beautiful object—cost 250 times more than the toaster he bought at the store and involved close to two thousand miles of travel to some of Britain's remotest locations. The Toaster Project may seem foolish, even insane. Yet, Thwaites's quixotic tale, told with self-deprecating wit, helps us reflect on the costs and perils of our cheap consumer culture, and in so doing reveals much about the organization of the modern world.

Steel

“If I can make steel,” I tell myself, “then the project is a goer.” I know that steel comes from iron. I have vague memories from school of terms like “pig iron,” “blast furnace,” and “slag.”

Going by annual production figures (given in millions of tonnes per year), the steel in my Value toaster was most likely refined in China, from iron ore mined in Australia, Brazil, or possibly (but not certainly) China also. Unfortunately, I don’t live in any of those places. The closest iron mine I can find to London is in the Forest of Dean, just on the English side of the border with South Wales. It’s 139 miles away. Google says that I could walk there in forty-six hours if I didn’t stop to eat or sleep. Luckily for me, some people had previously laid a railway line most of the way there.

London to Clearwell Caves, 139 miles

I phone up the mine to arrange my visit. The man I speak to, Ray Wright, is rather nonplussed when I explain that I’m trying to make a toaster so would like to come and mine some iron ore. Quite surprisingly, he doesn’t just hang up, but agrees to my visiting his mine the next day.

Ray Wright, freeminer at Clearwell Caves and Ancient Iron Mine

Iron for swords and ploughshares had been mined at Clearwell since the Iron Age. Up until it closed at the end of World War II, the mine had an output of thousands of tonnes a week. Ray had been a miner there when it was still going but now, along with his son Jonathan, runs Clearwell Caves and Ancient Iron Mine as a visitor attraction (voted Gloucestershire’s Family Attraction of the Year for 2003).

We arrive at the mine in the late afternoon (we being me and my good friend Simon, whom I’d dragged along to help). It soon becomes clear, however, that when I’d spoken to Ray on the phone and asked if I could come and mine some iron ore “because I’m trying to make a toaster,” Ray had thought I’d said, “because I’m trying to make a poster,” and so had assumed I’d just want to take a photo or something. To be fair to Ray, the poster scenario does sound more plausible.

In any case, my notion of simply hacking a few bits of crumbly rock from the wall of a tunnel is quickly stripped away (I had, in fact, decided against bringing my pickaxe with me because I’d assumed one would be provided). As Ray makes clear, mining is not something to be taken lightly—pneumatic drills and perhaps explosives would be needed. It is also not a half-day activity, because simply to get to the working face of the mine requires a long ride in an underground train.

Crestfallen, I begin to think my journey was wasted, and I’ll have to return to London with my suitcase still empty. After some embarrassingly persistent pleading on my part, Ray agrees to take us part way into the mine to see if we can find any ore lying about.

The walk through the mine is a fairly surreal experience because they have the Christmas decorations up. There’s even a stuffed reindeer and one of Ray’s assistants dressed as Father Christmas. I ask Ray what he thinks about the mine as a visitor attraction.

Ray 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.

Ray still does some mining at his mine though, for grammes, rather than tonnes, of a substance called iron ochre. This is basically rusty iron powder, which is used as a pigment in lipstick and artists’ oil paints.

I think Ray thought it a good idea to keep at least some mining going (even if just to make lipstick) so as not to end the history of mining that stretches back to a time when most residents of these islands lived in hovels (or indeed in the caves at Clearwell themselves). I wonder if Ray feels there’s something slightly ignominious about his mine having been turned into a tourist attraction.

What would have to change for the iron at Clearwell to be worth mining again? Probably nothing short of total global economic collapse. According to Ray, this is prophesied to happen in 2012 when the Mayan calendar runs out of numbers. I think he is holding out hope that Clearwell will become a working mine again sooner rather than later.

So, I didn’t actually mine the iron ore myself; Ray did...