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Everyday objects hide the work of countless people. In 2009 the British designer Thomas Thwaites spent nine months trying to build a simple electric toaster from scratch, starting from raw materials he gathered himself. When he plugged it in, its heating element melted.

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Thwaites made the attempt for his master's degree at London's Royal College of Art, prompted by a line in Douglas Adams's novel Mostly Harmless about a man who, left to himself, could not build a toaster. A cheap toaster has around 400 parts, so he cut the materials to five: steel, copper, nickel, plastic and mica, a heat-resistant mineral used for insulation. He told the story in The Toaster Project (2011), and his tools and toaster went on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum. A famous forerunner is the 1958 essay “I, Pencil”, in which the American writer Leonard Read lets a pencil explain that no single person knows how to make it, since its cedar, graphite, lacquer and glue come from different trades around the world. Scholars call the objects a society makes and uses its material culture, and study them for what they reveal about people.

Türkçe oku
Sıradan eşyaların ardında sayısız insanın emeği vardır. İngiliz tasarımcı Thomas Thwaites 2009'da basit bir elektrikli ekmek kızartma makinesini sıfırdan yapmak için dokuz ay uğraştı; işe hammaddeleri kendisi toplayarak başladı. Makineyi prize taktığında rezistansı eriyip gitti.

Thwaites bu denemeyi Londra'daki Royal College of Art'taki yüksek lisans projesi için yaptı. Fikir, Douglas Adams'ın Çoğunlukla Zararsız (Mostly Harmless) romanındaki bir cümleden doğdu: Romanda, kendi başına kalsa bir ekmek kızartma makinesi bile yapamayacak bir adamdan söz edilir. Ucuz bir makinede bile 400 kadar parça bulunduğu için Thwaites malzemeleri beşe indirdi: çelik, bakır, nikel, plastik ve ısıya dayanıklı, yalıtımda kullanılan bir mineral olan mika. Yaşadıklarını The Toaster Project (2011) adlı kitabında anlattı; aletleri ve makinesi Londra'daki Victoria ve Albert Müzesi'nde sergilendi. Aynı düşüncenin ünlü bir öncülü, Amerikalı yazar Leonard Read'in 1958 tarihli “Ben, Kurşun Kalem” (I, Pencil) denemesidir; Read burada sözü bir kaleme bırakır. Kalem, sedir ağacından grafite, cilasından tutkalına her parçasının dünyanın dört bir yanında farklı mesleklerin emeğiyle üretildiğini anlatır; bu yüzden onu baştan sona yapmayı bilen tek bir kişi bile yoktur. Bir toplumun yapıp kullandığı eşyaların bütününe “maddi kültür” denir; araştırmacılar bu eşyaları, insanlar hakkında anlattıkları için inceler.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Material culture
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On the mainland, the last woolly mammoths died out around 10,000 years ago, as the Ice Age ended and the cold grasslands they lived on shrank. Two island populations held on much longer: one on St Paul Island in Alaska until about 5,600 years ago, and one on Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago, around 2000 BC. Rising seas had cut Wrangel off from Siberia, leaving some 300 to 1,000 animals alone there for thousands of years. These dates come from radiocarbon dating of bones and tusks, which measures how much of a slowly decaying form of carbon is left in them. Genetic studies show that the population was inbred but stayed stable for thousands of years, so its end seems to have come suddenly. What finally killed the last mammoths is still unknown.

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