The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch

Author: Thomas Thwaites

Princeton Architectural Press (2011), $19.95 (Out of Print), $5.99 on Kindle

A good friend gave me a copy of The Toaster Project last year, and I finally got around to reading it a couple of weeks ago. As the title suggests, the author, Thomas Thwaites, attempts to build a toaster from scratch—gathering all the steel, mica, copper, nickel, and oil needed to construct it. Although the book is a decade and a half old, it is well worth reading.

Thwaites’s story is filled with humor, wonder, and food for thought. Readers will laugh while seeing how something as mundane as a toaster is the result of complicated supply chains and complex production processes. His observations and comments about markets, both positive and negative, are worth taking seriously.

The Toaster Project starts with Thwaites as a student at the Royal College of Art in London working on a project for an art show. He wants to build a toaster from scratch, providing himself three rules:

1. The toaster must resemble a store-bought model.

2. The toaster must be made from scratch, using raw materials as they come from nature.

3. The toaster must be made from materials gathered in the UK.

Thwaites soon learns that he’s in over his head and must bend (and sometimes break) his own rules to finish the project. He first deconstructs an $8.91 toaster to reverse engineer. To his surprise, the basic bargain toaster contains over 400 intricate parts.

He travels across England to collect raw materials. He gathers iron ore from an old mine and then smelts it in a leaf blower furnace (after a failed smelting attempt in a microwave). He creatively makes starch-based plastic out of potatoes (because he could not get the oil from BP). He collects copper by using water, chemicals, and air to separate the copper from ore using foam (a process known as “froth flotation“). In the end, the project took nine months, cost him just over $2,600, and resulted in a practically non-functioning toaster.  

Anyone who’s read Leonard Read’s I, Pencil—which Thwaites cites as an influence—will not be surprised by the book’s message: the mundane objects we take for granted result from the spontaneous convergence of countless individual efforts, without any overarching mastermind directing the process. Thwaites, unlike Read, is left feeling conflicted about markets rather than inspired.

For one, Thwaites is troubled by the environmental consequences of mineral extraction, even as he acknowledges the benefits of affordable, labor-saving products. He comments that millions of people (himself included) benefit from having these affordable appliances despite the costs of pollution. The toaster enables people “to devote less time making their toast and more time do to other activities, like going to art school and doing ridiculous things like taking nine months to make a single toaster from scratch.” Thwaites wrestles with these ideas throughout the book. He knows that government intervention fails because policymakers lack the knowledge to properly enact policy and are guided by their own self-interest (hitting on two important ideas in economics). Here, economists such as Ronald Coase, Harold Demsetz, and Elinor Ostrom can provide insight into how property rights can be used to mitigate resource conflicts.

Thwaites also tells the story of Ray Wright, who works at a mine-turned-tourist-attraction at Clearwell and helped Thwaites get iron ore. Ray laments that the mine was rendered obsolete due to larger-scaling mining operations overseas. Ray’s story is all too common now in 2024, with growing skepticism of free trade. To address Thwaites concerns, I recommend the advice of my AIER colleague Dr. Samuel Gregg in his book The Next American Economy: advocates for free markets must go beyond touting efficiency and affordability. Instead, they should highlight America’s history as a commercial republic, where innovation strengthened communities and made the nation a global leader.

Another challenge Thwaites grapples with is the disparity between the costs of making a toaster ($2,600) and the price sold at market ($8.91). Thwaites’s confusion is an important, but often overlooked, point: cost and price are not interchangeable in economics. Costs refer to the value of what Thwaites would have done with his time and resources had he not decided to make a toaster from scratch, so it’s more than just money spent. That means the time he could have spent with friends instead of traveling across England to gather raw materials is a cost of the project. The time it took to deconstruct and reconstruct a toaster instead of spending time with friends is a cost of the project. The time it took learning how to extract copper from foam instead of learning another skill is also a cost of a project. Meanwhile, a price is the amount of a particular good (in most cases money) that one pays in exchange for a toaster. 

Costs influence price indirectly through changes in supply and demand. For example, suppose toaster makers anticipate an increase in demand for toasters, so they respond by increasing their demand for steel, mica, copper, nickel, plastic, and labor. All else equal, if the demand for these inputs is great enough, and if the supply of those inputs is even slightly unresponsive to price changes, the costs of the inputs will increase. 

Before sellers consider passing along those cost increases onto customers through higher prices, they must assess how sensitive those buyers are to price changes. If the buyers are more sensitive to price changes than sellers, any increase in price means buyers will purchase fewer toasters. In such cases, sellers will absorb as much of the cost increases as possible to avoid losing potential sales, passing on as little of the increased cost to buyers as possible.

When considering the ample supply of functioning toasters (even highlighted in his own art exhibit) and customer demand for toasters, it was a mistake to list the cost of producing a toaster from scratch as the sale price. Although Thwaites’ price was set intentionally as a part of the art exhibit, it signals an opportunity for economists to provide greater clarity about the relationship between cost and price.

Thwaites also stumbles upon economic ideas, sometimes intentionally—such as his discussion of Adam Smith and the division of labor—and sometimes unintentionally, such as the realization that “Perhaps the majority of human endeavour can be reduced to the pursuit of additional modicums of comfort—like being slightly less tired, being slightly less bored, or just an evenly crispy piece of toast—small trifles to which we quickly become accustomed.” This sentiment unintentionally echoes Ludwig von Mises in Human Action, who notes that we act because we want to remove discomfort, can envision a world with less discomfort, and believe that our actions will result in alleviating discomfort. 

The Toaster Project teaches readers to appreciate the complexity behind everyday objects we often take for granted. It provides a valuable perspective on how the everyman views markets and society as well as identifying opportunities for economists to clarify how the world around us works.

*Thwaites converts the value in pounds to dollars in the book. I have converted those dollar prices to current dollars.