My story? It starts with being perpetually curious…
Particularly, curious about how things work, how they’re made, and how they can be reconstructed to solve different problems in unique situations.
As a child, the fact that I never took the toaster apart is a testament to my mother’s vigilance regarding her small appliances not my desire to disassemble it into all its disparate parts.
Odd? Perhaps. But when the specificity of the appliance is removed, the impulse is that of an engineer.
While I understood the process—bread goes in, heat is applied, and toast comes out—I wanted to know the how.
There had to have been some sort of spring action down in there—how was it set up and what did the mechanics of the delayed release look like? Why did it sometimes catch and sometimes didn’t? How many filaments and how were they attached? Was there more lurking in the underbelly? Were systems separated or was it all one big blob in there?
My impulse was to crack it open and find out.