On 10 February 2012, aerospace engineering student Alan MacMasters attended a university lecture where the class was cautioned against using Wikipedia as a source. The lecturer mentioned that you never know who could be the next inventor of the toaster on the Wikipedia page. Following the lecture, Alan and his friends edited the Wikipedia toaster article, replacing the articles name with Alan MacMasters', alleging he invented the toaster in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1893.
The actual inventor of the electric pop-up bread-toaster is Charles Strite in 1920,[1] who, working in Stillwater, Oklahoma, developed the appliance to ensure workers received evenly toasted bread.[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] Depending on the definition of a toaster, the electric heater patented by Frank E. Shailor in 1909[7] or the electric cooker by George J Schneider in 1905[8] can also be considered the first toaster; the former is however not a pop-up toaster and only toasts one side of the bread, and the latter makes no mention of bread in the patent.
On 9 February 2012, aerospace engineering student Alan MacMasters was at a university lecture on dynamics where the class was warned not to use Wikipedia as a source. Additionally, the lecturer pointed out that his friend had edited the Wikipedia article about toasters, falsely claiming he was the inventor.
After the lecture, Alan and his friends visited the toaster article on Wikipedia, where one of his friends, Alex, edited the article to replace the lecturer's friend's name with Alan MacMasters, claiming he invented the toaster in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1893.
A year later, Alex contemplated the extent to which he could escalate the prank. In February 2013, he created an article dedicated to Alan MacMasters, including an image of himself manipulated to resemble a 19th century photograph, and published it on Wikipedia.
In the article, Alex mentioned that the product was not commercially successful. He also attributed the invention of the electric kettle to MacMasters and suggested that the toaster had contributed to one of Britain’s earliest fatal appliance fires. One fabricated anecdote recounted a woman whose kitchen table caught fire after the toaster's heating elements melted.
Alex intended the article as a jest; however, newspapers, encyclopedias, government agencies, and the Hagley Museum and Library in Delaware perpetuated the false story of MacMasters as the inventor, where Alex then used these articles citing MacMasters as the inventor of the toaster to further propagate the false information. Moreover, a primary school in Scotland dedicated a day to MacMasters, and he was nominated to appear on a £50 note by an individual who responded to a request for nominations from the Bank of England. During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Scottish Government-funded organizations cited Alan’s story as evidence of how an independent Scotland could succeed.
In July 2022, a 15-year-old Redditor named Adam posted an explanation, revealing that the photo on Alan MacMasters' Wikipedia page was edited and not a legitimate photo. This research was prompted after his teacher spoke about MacMasters in class and Adam searched him up. However, Adam was unaware that the entire article was a hoax. Adam reported his concern on the Internet forum Wikipediocracy, where users discovered the article’s fraudulent nature and alerted Wikipedia administrators, who promptly marked the page for deletion. Alex’s Wikipedia account, which he used to perpetrate the hoax, was subsequently blocked from the platform.
Alex anonymously told Wikipediocracy that he initially thought the prank wouldn’t cause much harm. He described the first time he realized the prank was harmful was when he read a book about Victorian inventors and found Alan MacMasters listed as one of the inventors. Alan later said in an interview that he still edits Wikipedia as an apology, but remains anonymous out of fear of being banned.[9]