Student makes typewriter that lets you write on toast

A student of the Parsons School of Design in New York has invented a ‘Toaster-Typewriter’ as a part of their thesis research project.

The legacy of the typewriter is still being kept alive, down to the QWERTY layout keyboards we use, or the typewriter-style keyboards released by brands like Logitech. Even vintage-style typewriters are still being sold on sites like Amazon to this day.

One student has taken the classic typewriter of old and put a unique spin on it. Ritika Kedia, a student at Parsons School for Design in New York, took a 50-year-old typewriter, and a $15 toaster to create ‘the Toaster-Typewriter’ which allows you to type burned-in messages on a piece of toast.

Spotted by Hackster.io, the Toaster-Typewriter project is part of Ritika’s thesis research for BFA Product Design. The entire project was completed over 15 weeks, with the actual engineering of the toaster-typewriter itself, according to the student’s website, taking eight weeks.

Ritika explained, “This 15-week-long investigation attempts to understand humor’s role in design and creates futures where humor is embedded in our everyday objects and technologies. The machine, The Toaster-Typewriter is the first iteration of what technology with a sense of humor can look like.”

Over the process of those eight weeks, Ritika took apart a 50-year-old typewriter, discovered in a junkyard in Brooklyn, and removed any dirt and access rust through its time spent abandoned. This, alongside the budget toaster bought in Target, was reverse-engineered, to remove any materials not needed for the bizarre, yet inventive toaster-typewriter project.

The student then worked closely with electrical engineers from Hack Manhattan to develop the method of how the typewriter would burn letters onto bread. This process involved conductive copper wire shaped into alphabetical letters, attached to a transformer power adapter. Custom clay letterheads were then added as a layer of protection against any electrocution risks.

The result, as seen in the short clip provided by Creative Applications, reveals Ritika using their brand-new invention to type ‘SOS’ into a piece of toast.

While it won’t replace your gaming keyboard any time soon, the humor intended for the Toaster-Typewriter project is most definitely on full display.