THE VIDEO SHELF · building from scratch
Thomas Thwaites: How I built a toaster -- from scratch
Designer Thomas Thwaites describes his attempt to build a toaster from scratch, from mining ore and deriving plastic from oil. It is a short TED talk on how much civilization a simple object depends on.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN uses it as the standard illustration of hidden complexity and supply-chain dependencies behind everyday objects.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- TED
- Topic
- building from scratch
- Format
- talk
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 9
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2019–2025
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
The Toaster Project is a good example of this: [VIDEO] [LINK] He attempted to build the basic components of a toaster from scratch. Smelting metal, molding plastic, etc. The book is a tough recommendation because he sortof gives up on the later parts and limps …
scrooched_moose on Hacker News · 2019-07
In Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?Great book! In the introduction(IIRC) the author mentions Thomas Thwaites' TED talk "How I built a toaster from scratch" - which is a great example of the hidden complexities of "from scratch" (and also just a fun talk) [VIDEO] Kind of reminds me of the …
pentaphobe on Hacker News · 2023-07
In The Knowledge: How to rebuild our world from scratch
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.