By John MacLeod
...and how the Bank of England almost put him on a £50 note!
The mackintosh. Tarmacadam. The pneumatic tyre. Anaesthesia and, indeed, asepsis and even television – and to the long list of Scotland’s historic discoveries and wonders, in recent years we have confidently claimed the electric toaster. For the first was built, in edinburgh, in 1893 by one Alan MacMasters. And, a year later, in Guildford, it even caused the world’s first, fatal home-appliance fire.
By 2012, the Daily Mirror, no less, confidently listed MacMasters’s achievement as one of the ‘Life-changing innovations that put Britain on the map’.
his feat was trumpeted in an American museum. A Scottish primary school spent a whole day celebrating the clever Victorian and there was a bid to put Alan MacMasters’s portrait on a new Bank of england £50 note.
enthusiastic Nationalists trumpeted his success as, somehow, an argument for Scotland’s independence in 2014. The Scottish Government’s own Brand Scotland website vaunted MacMasters, his little part in domestic history was cited in at least a dozen books – and a dessert was got up in his honour for the Great British Menu cookery show.
And, in 2021, Kingsmill the baker tweeted the abiding glory of Alan MacMasters in celebration of National Toast Day – which, it seems, is actually a thing.
Alas, last year and thanks to a suspicious 15-year old boy, it was all exposed as a complete hoax.
And Alan MacMasters is in fact alive and well – a 30-year old aerospace engineer living in London.
‘Not the inventor of the toaster,’ he giggled to the BBC, ‘You shouldn’t believe everything on the internet.’
It was a Wikipedia stunt pulled by a student pal in 2012 and who had cheerfully helped himself (with permission) to Alan MacMasters’s name.
Alex, the lad responsible, is sufficiently embarrassed not publicly to share his surname. And points out primly that a hoax entry on Wikipedia already existed, attributing the invention of the toaster to one Maddy Kennedy.
University lecturers and, increasingly, editors warn those under their tuition or training never to rely on Wikipedia and not to cite it for anything.
The voluminous online encyclopaedia has two vulnerabilities. Practically anyone can edit it, and the source-citations that made the Alan MacMasters’s romp look so convincing were born of its own circularity – newspapers that had repeated the claim, and so on.
And on February 6, 2012 a University of Surrey lecturer had actually warned Alan MacMasters and his classmates not to use Wikipedia as a source, pointing out that a pal of his, the selfsame Maddy Kennedy, had successfully cooked up an entry claiming the electric toaster as his own invention.
Alex and Alan shortly found the post and ‘corrected’ it, laying the laurels on the brow of young MacMasters.
A year later, in 2013, Alex went further, creating a full entry for himself and his toaster glory and doctoring a photograph of himself, suitably tweaked to look most 1890s and with a hint of sepia.
Surely, the lads thought, it would not be long before Wikipedia rumbled the con. ‘At the time,’ recalls Alex, ‘we had a good laugh, but we quickly forgot about it.’
The internet, though, never forgets and not a soul at Wikipedia noticed. Nor did Alex forget quite as completely as all that.
‘The article started out as just a couple of sentences and, over time, I decided to start writing more and more ridiculous things,’ he says. Among other details, he even suggested MacMasters had helped develop lighting systems for the London Underground.
‘These [claims] would get picked up in different types of media, I would cite them, and they would become fact,’ Alex says. And there was another handy citation, from the Daily Credulous, to append to the Wikipedia article.
To him, it was but a jape, a victimless crime that, at most, might mean someone giving the wrong answer in a pub quiz. But Alex’s Wikipedia confection has one vulnerability: that doctored photograph of himself.
The bottom of the image seemed to have been ripped off – no doubt to hide some unVictorian detail, like a polyester top or a blokey necklace – and it was this, earlier this year, that first roused the suspicions of a Kent schoolboy called Adam.
Adam, 15, made close study of the photograph after a teacher mentioned Alan MacMasters and his toaster achievement in class – and, on a Reddit forum, the boy coldly pronounced the snap a fake.
‘A lot of people actually replied, “I have used that picture in a presenta
‘We had a good laugh about the change’
tion for school,”, purrs Adam. ‘I thought it was hilarious.’
But within hours his opinion had been shared on Wikipediocracy. Wikipedia editors were fast alerted and, within 24 hours, they had nominated Alan MacMasters’s little biography – fatted, over a decade, with ever more improbable claims – for deletion.
Look for him now and you are directed to an understandably huffy Wikidata page detailing the hoax. And Alex’s own Wikipedia page has been blocked.
But what had long eluded Wikipedia’s editors, assorted authors, The Scotsman, the Daily Mirror and even the Scottish Government had, in the end, been effortlessly exposed by a kid who has still not sat his GCSEs.
Given its volunteer editorship, a site like Wikipedia will always be vulnerable to false or fabricated content. One American study found that nine out of ten medical entries were incorrect or out of date – a trifle unnerving, given that 70 per cent of doctors regularly refer to it. It took months for Wikipedia to delete the improbable claim that Alex Lawther, the talented young English actor, held his breath for 40 minutes at a time during underwater takes for a 2014 movie – and if that sort of bunkum can readily be spotted, what about the fibs and untruths of rather more elusive character?
For ours is increasingly an age where few now believe in the concept of objective truth and where a great many people seem capable of believing anything, from nutty conspiracy theories about Covid vaccines to suggestions that the late Queen was actually a shape-shifting humanoid lizard.
Why else, such nutters insist, was she buried in a lead-lined coffin? And it is hard not to feel that the cult of Alan MacMasters took off so steeply, and endured so long, because so many people – especially in Scotland – wanted it to be true.
The saddest form of this, of course, is the conspiracy theory. Many people simply did not want to believe that a man as consequential as President Kennedy could be murdered by such a nebbish as Lee Harvey Oswald and all on his lonesome.
Nor could Diana really have died from such prosaic neglects as a drunken chauffeur and forgetting to click her seatbelt; nor could sweet, smiling Pope John Paul I actually have croaked, of natural causes, barely a month into the job in 1978.
These tragedies seemed so meaningless – and so the imaginative began to construct vast and detailed plots involving all sorts of sinister forces and, worse still, found they could make money out of it.
The reasons why so many notable inventions of the modern age were by Scots are both plain and prosaic. Education was, historically, much more widely available north of the Border – thanks to that much-maligned institution, the Kirk – and it was a broad education, with strong emphasis on mathematics and navigation and so on.
By contrast, far into Victorian times school was preserved for the privileged – and, mostly, for boys – and focused to absurd degree on Greek and Latin. The rotary steam engine, the bicycle and so on were never likely to be devised by chaps whose chief educational attainment was the ability to recite a whimsical snatch of Ovid.
For Alex and Alan, the confection of Alan MacMasters was just a bit of fun. They never set out to hurt anyone and never made a penny out of the prank.
And they cut rather more dignified figures than the many media outlets and public organisations who fell for it – and refused to make any comment when approached by the BBC for its detailed online report.
For the record, the electric toaster was actually invented by one Frank Shailor, in 1909, on behalf of the General Electric Company in the United States.
As his compatriot, Mark Twain, once whimsically observed, it’s not the stuff you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s the stuff you think you know that just ain’t so.
‘It took months for Wikipedia to delete the claim Alex Lawther held his breath for 40 minutes’