Watch: Can Olympians make their own breakfast toast simply by cycling?
A series of YouTube video check if athletes can power a 700-watt toaster.
The Olympics are here. Thousands of athletes will be participating across hundreds of different events. Meanwhile, computers have started beating humans at chess, at the Chinese board game GO, and have also started playing football. Still, there is no separate human vs machine category at the Olympics, yet.
But where the Olympics cannot help, YouTube certainly can.
The year 2015 saw the birth of the Toaster Challenge, with three Swedish athletes trying to produce enough energy from cycling to toast a slice of bread – Robert Förstemann, a track cyclist who won a bronze medal at the 2012 London Olympics, Ida Ingemarsdotter, a cross-country skier with a gold medal at the 2014 Winter Olympics, and rower Lassi Karonen.
All three are bushed by the end of the video, surprised at the amount of energy it takes to make a piece of toast. The video claims that 43,000 Robert Förstemanns are needed to power an airplane. Not a very feasible way to make energy then.
The experiment was performed as a way to measure the difference between the amount of energy humans consume and the amount they can generate.
Below are the other two videos in the series.
Everyone's favourite breakfast appliance has been used as a metaphor to examine the human condition more than once.
In 2012, as a way to comment on the distance present between humans and the machines they use on a day-to-day basis, writer Thomas Thwaites decided to make a toaster from scratch.
This is what he came up with. He got everything except insulation.
