Perhaps the most powerful illustration of specialisation came when designer Thomas Thwaites decided to make a toaster from scratch, using only his own labour and raw materials he had personally sourced. Thwaites obtained iron ore from a disused mine in England, copper from a mine in Wales, and mica from a mountain in Scotland. When a home blast furnace failed to make steel, he resorted to smelting iron ore in his microwave. The plastic casing came from melting down garbage. In the end, Thwaites’s toaster experiment took nine months. If we value his time at the average wage in the United Kingdom at the time, the labour cost was GBP19,000, plus around GBP1000 for expenses. Thwaites’s GBP20,000 toaster was about 5000 times costlier than if he had bought one at his local retailer for GBP4. Oh, and store-bought toasters actually work. When Thwaites plugged his toaster in, it lasted five seconds before it began melting down.
