The Royal College of Art (RCA) project you are referring to is The Toaster Project, created by graduate student Thomas Thwaites for his MA in Design Interactions in 2009. [1, 2]
Thwaites set out to build a standard electric toaster from the “ground up,” meaning he would mine and process all the raw materials himself rather than buying pre-made components. The project was a critical investigation into the complexity of modern global supply chains and our dependency on them for even the most mundane objects. [1, 3, 4, 5]
Key Project Details
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The Inspiration: A quote from Douglas Adams’ Mostly Harmless, where a character realizes that, left to his own devices, he couldn’t even build a toaster.
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The Process: Thwaites reverse-engineered a £3.99 Argos Value Range toaster, which had 404 separate parts. He simplified these into five basic materials:
- Iron: Smelted from ore he hand-carried from a mine in Wales using a leaf blower and later a domestic microwave.
- Copper: Extracted from “copper-rich” water from an old mine.
- Mica: Gathered from a mountainside in Scotland.
- Nickel: Obtained by melting down old coins after being unable to visit a nickel mine.
- Plastic: Originally intended to be made from crude oil (he even asked BP for a ride to an oil rig), he eventually “cheated” by melting down scrap plastic.
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The Result: After nine months and approximately £1,187 in costs, the final product resembled a “half-baked, hand-made pastiche” of a toaster. When first plugged in, it toasted bread for a few seconds before the heating element melted.
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Legacy: The project became a viral sensation, leading to a TED Talk and a book titled The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch. The original toaster and artifacts are now in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15]
Would you like to know more about the specific smelting techniques he used or the economic theories his project explored?
References
[1] https://www.dezeen.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org [3] https://www.dezeen.com [4] https://we-make-money-not-art.com [5] https://develop3d.com [6] https://podcasts.apple.com [7] https://www.youtube.com [8] https://www.thomasthwaites.com [9] https://www.youtube.com [10] https://www.hackwriters.com [11] https://v2.nl [12] https://sculpture.org [13] https://books.google.com [14] https://v2.nl [15] https://www.chiaroscuromagazine.com