The Edinburgh toaster conspiracy: How one man persuaded the world that the toaster was invented in Scotland's Capital

Here is the story of how one man persuaded the world that the toaster was invented in Edinburgh - and why you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet.

Last year, the BBC interviewed a man called Alan MacMasters, who the world generally believed invented the toaster in Edinburgh in 1893.

The story goes that this enterprising Scottish inventor contacted the English electrical engineer Crompton & Co with his idea for the new kitchen appliance.

The problem with this, is that it just isn’t true.

The Edinburgh toaster conspiracy: How one man persuaded the world that the toaster was invented in Scotland's Capital (Photo by Katherine Frey)

These lies were printed in newspapers, taught in schools, published in books, tweeted by Kingsmill and replicated across the internet far and wide. It wasn’t until a 15 year old school boy in Kent spotted something suspicious on MacMasters’ Wikipedia page. The picture looked too edited to be a genuine Victorian photo. He wrote his suspicions on an online forum, and that was it. It all unravelled.

Alan MacMasters is an aerospace engineer from London who, while at university, was told over and over again that students shouldn’t use Wikipedia as a source. One day, his lecturer joked about how one of his pals had changed a name on the online encyclopedia to say that “Maddy Kennedy” had invented the toaster. Alan’s friend Alex was inspired by the tale and jumped straight on to the website, instead changing the name of the toaster inventor to Alan’s.

"Alex is a bit of a joker, it's part of why we love him," Alan said in his interview with the BBC. "The article had already been vandalised anyway, it was just changing the nature of the incorrect information. I thought it was funny, I never expected it to last."

It was only when a newspaper wrongly listed Alan MacMasters as the real life inventor of the toaster that it occurred to Alan to take the joke a little further. He created a whole Wikipedia page specifically dedicated to himself, or rather, the fictional version of himself. He posted a picture of himself with the article, but edited it to look old fashioned. It wasn’t long before the name started appearing everywhere, including a US Museum which called him a famous Edinburgh inventor.

And this is how it continued, until a Kent schoolboy posted his suspicion online, where it was promptly shared on Wikipediocracy, which then alerted Wikipedia editors, who deleted the article within 24 hours.

Wikipedia stress that they take hoaxed articles very seriously, and although the premise of the website is that people can edit to add information to a subject, to widen the knowledge, there are editors who monitor the site and details that are found to be incorrect are taken down, and accounts suspended. Alan MacMasters now appears not on the Wiki page for toaster inventing, but on a list of famous hoaxes.

So, let’s clear something up. The electric toaster was invented by Frank Shailor of General Electric in 1909...or was it?

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