Arrogantly Thomas Thwaites decided to disregards the lesson from Douglas Adams and tried to make - a toaster. “There’s a lot of effort, intelligence and history that goes into making even something like a toaster. On the one hand that's great…On the other hand, is it worth putting all this time, effort and energy into something that is a pretty marginal addition to our existence?” Thomas Thwaites asks in his lecture.
(see Thwaites book on amazon.com: The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch)