In 2009, a design student named Thomas Thwaites bought the cheapest toaster he could find. It cost £3.94. Then he took it apart to see what he'd need to build one himself, completely from scratch, starting from raw rocks in the ground.

The cheap toaster contained over 400 separate parts, made from nearly 100 different materials. He decided to focus only on iron, copper, nickel, mica, and plastic. He thought that narrowing would make it manageable. It did not.

To get iron, Thwaites traveled to an old mine and hauled out iron ore. Then he had to turn rock into metal, which is where the trouble started.

He tried smelting it in a microwave. That obviously did not work.

He eventually got it working with a leaf-blower aimed into a makeshift furnace, essentially rediscovering metallurgy in his own words as he went.

Every material told the same story. He made plastic out of potato starch because he couldn't get crude oil (British Petroleum politely declined to fly him to an oil rig). He got copper by soaking ore and chemicals. He carved molds by hand. At every step, he learned the same lesson. The smaller the scale you work at, the further back in time you're forced to go. Alone, in a modern city, he kept ending up in the Bronze Age.

Nine months later, Thwaites had a toaster. It was lumpy, unpainted, and looked like something excavated rather than built. It cost him around £1,187, roughly 250 times the price of the one on the shelf. He plugged it in. It toasted bread for a few seconds, then died.

The £3.94 toaster isn't cheap because toasters are simple. It's cheap because behind it sits an invisible machine of staggering scale. Mines on one continent, refineries on another, factories, shipping, and the accumulated knowledge of thousands of specialists who each know one small piece of the puzzle.

Try it yourself sometime, at least in your head. Pick the simplest thing on your desk. A pencil, a paperclip, a rubber band. Now trace it all the way back to raw earth, every material, every process, every person who had to know something you don't. You won't get far before it becomes preventative.

Every ordinary object is a monument to thousands of strangers cooperating across continents and centuries, none of whom will ever meet.

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PS — This is just to make a toaster. Try looking up how silicon wafers are made and you’ll really not know where to start.