… when we do so small a thing as turning on a 150 W light bulb, we are manipulating a quantity of energy substantially greater than a human being could produce in sustained effort. The energy consumed by an oven, or hot water heater is an order of magnitude beyond our capacity. The energy consumed by an automobile can easily be three orders of magnitude greater. If all the people in the United States worked continuously like galley slaves, they could barely equal the power output of even a single city power plant.

- from page 4 of the Introduction to A Heat Transfer Textbook, by John H. Leinhard IV and John H. Leinhard V, 2001.

Appliances have made a massive and direct impression on western domestic life and our attitudes to energy input and human effort verses notions of convenience and the designed desire for it. As appliance industry competition erodes profit margins with ever greater economies of scale to appease stock holders share prices, the unrelenting drive for niches within ever smaller appliances intensifies. Electric toothbrushes, electric can-openers, hand-held blenders and food processors, coffee machines and grinders, automatic bread makers, popcorn poppers and even vacuum packaging systems.
[In fact, just last night, the toilets in the restaurant we ate at had 'electric' paper towel dispensers: a motion detector senses your hand and then unrolls a suitable length of paper towel!?]

Hand-grinding coffee beans with an old grinder has for me extended the daily ritual of coffee drinking further back into the making process. I enjoy feeling the resistive jolts through the handle from my effort as the beans crack and smash, without the nerve shattering pitch of a high revving electric motor. My mother originally bought the pictured Zassenhaus manual mill some time in the 1960s (it still has the McEwens price tag on the side), which I have indefinitely “borrowed” . No motorised grinder could function for 40 odd years! (let alone, require no electricity). Machine verses human power is intensity verses ‘extensity’. Whilst I can’t hand-grind beans as quickly as an electric grinder, as it takes me about one minute to grind what would take 10 seconds for a machine, do I really need those other 50 seconds? Is it those 50 seconds of time that the labour-saving device offers that are important, or the connected experience that enriches the making process?