look around us much of what surrounds us started life as various rocks and sludge buried in the ground in various places in the world
was also inspired by this quote from douglas adams and the situation is from the hitchhiker 's guide to the galaxy and the situation it describes is
the hero of the book he 's a twentieth century man finds himself alone on a strange planet populated only by a technologically primitive people
and he kind of assumes that yes he'll become these villagers he'll become their emperor and transform their society with his wonderful
but he didn't have wikipedia so i thought okay i'll try and make an electric toaster from scratch and working on the
idea that the cheapest electric toaster would also be the simplest to reverse engineer i went and bought the cheapest toaster i could find
it home and was kind of dismayed to discover that inside this object which i'd bought for just three pounds
there are four hundred different bits made out of a hundred plus different materials i didn't have the rest of my life to do this project
had maybe nine months so i thought okay i'll start with five and these were steel mica plastic copper and nickel
how do you make steel and professor cilliers was very kind and talked me through it and my vague rememberings from gcse science well steel comes from
and said hi i'm trying to make a toaster can i come up and get some
creatures
three hundred and fifty million years
atmosphere when you study geology you can see what's happened in the past and there were terrific changes
as you can see they had the christmas decorations up and of course it wasn't actually a working mine anymore because
ray was a miner there the mine had closed and had been reopened as a kind of touristattraction because of course it can't compete on the scale of operations which are happening is south america australia wherever
i got my suitcase of iron ore and dragged it back to london on the train and then was faced with the problem okay how do you make this rock into components for a toaster
so i went back to professor cilliers and he said go to the library so i did and was looking through the undergraduate textbooks on metallurgy
i was trying to do because of course they don't actually tell you how to do it if you want to do it yourself and you don't have a smelting plant
so i ended up going to the history of science library and looking at this book this is the first textbook on metallurgy
in the west at least and there you can see that woodcut is basically what i ended up doing but instead of a bellows i had a leaf
and that was something that reoccurred throughout the project was the smaller the scale you want to work on the further back in time you have to go and so this is
a day and about half a night smelting this iron i dragged out this stuff and it wasn't
luckily i found a patent online for industrial furnaces that use microwaves and thirty minutes at full power and i was able to finish off the process
so my next
the next thing i was trying to get was copper again this mine was once the largest copper mine in the world
it's not anymore but i found a retired geology professor to take me down and he said okay i'll let you have some water from the mine
and the reason i was interested in getting water is because water which goes through mines becomes kind of acidic and will start picking up dissolving the minerals
from the mine and a good example of this is the rio tinto which is in portugal as you can see it's got lots and lots of minerals dissolved in it so many such that it's now just a home for
bacteria who really like acidic toxic conditions but anyway the water i dragged back from the isle of anglesey where the mine was there was enough copper in it such that i could cast the pins of my metal electric
next thing i was off to scotland to get mica and mica is a mineral
which is a very good insulator and very good at insulating electricity
that's me getting mica and the last material i'm going to talk about today is plastic and of course my toaster had to have a plastic case
even then they weren't convinced and said okay we'll phone you back never did
ways of making plastic and you can actually make plastic from obviously oils which come from plants but also from starches so this is attempting to make potato starch plastic
and for awhile that was looking really good i poured it into the mold which you can see there which i've made from a tree trunk and it
was looking good for awhile but i left it outside because you had to leave it outside to dry and unfortunately i came back and there were snails eating the unhydrolyzed bits of potato
so kind of out of desperation i decided that i could think laterally and geologists have actually christened well they're debating whether to christen the age that we're living in
like fossils would suddenly disappear and also i thought that there would be synthetic polymers
and i went up to manchester to visit a place called axion recycling and they're at the sharp end of what's called the weee which is this europeanelectrical and electronic waste directive
and that was brought into force to try and deal with the mountain of stuff that is just being made and then living for a while in our homes and then going to landfill
this is
there's a picture of
that's it without the case on and there it is on the shelves thanks
in once tt yeah i did plug it in i don't know if you could see but i was never able to make insulation for the
kew gardens were insistent that i couldn't come and hack into their rubber tree so the wires were uninsulated so there was two hundred and forty volts going through these homemadecopper wires homemade plug
and for about five seconds the toaster toasted but then unfortunately the element kind of melted itself but i considered it a partial success
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