What Happens When You Try to Build a Toaster from Scratch

I spotted this book on a shelf and felt such an overwhelming aura radiating from its spine that I bought it at the speed of light.
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This blog covers things like building RC cars from scratch — but what does "from scratch" even mean?

The moment you head to Akihabara to buy parts for your "from scratch" RC car, is it really from scratch anymore?

"I built an RC car from scratch with Arduino!" — but you didn't build the Arduino.

"I built my own Arduino!" — that's roughly the limit of what I've done.
But you didn't make the ATmega328P chip. Or the Bluetooth dongle. Or even the perfboard.
And come to think of it — what exactly is solder made of?

This book traces the industrial history of humanity all the way back to the Bronze Age, and follows one person's attempt to build a toaster from scratch using only materials that can be extracted from the earth.
The conclusion, spoiler alert: it can't be done.



Well — Bronze Age humans managed it. And Leo Baekeland, inventor of synthetic resin, must have started synthesizing it in a laboratory at some point.

But industry is built on layer upon layer of accumulated human effort, and at some point it becomes impossible to pull out just the lower layers.
Humanity's answer: stop worrying about it and keep moving forward.

That's a bit tough on the "I built it myself" crowd, but maybe that's exactly why people in that crowd keep building things — to rediscover and reaffirm these facts firsthand.
Like elementary school kids growing vegetables in the school garden to understand where food comes from.
Yes. That must be it.