Wikipedia says that the electric toaster was invented by a Scottish scientist in the late 1800s. But when a 15-year-old girl looked at the page of Alan MacMasters, whose website is said to have invented the electric kettle, she noticed something odd about him. There was something strange about the alleged photograph of MacMasters taken in the 1890s.
The young man, whose name was announced as Adam, said, “When I first looked, I realized that it did not look like a normal photo. “It looked like it had been played with,” he says.
Other than that, at first glance, the article looked like any complete article with plenty of references. The article claims that MacMasters is trying to cut costs by using cheaper metals for the filaments and large amounts of nickel in the wire. “The resulting lamp got so hot that it began to toast nearby bread,” MacMasters emphasizes.
This is what the long-running MacMasters page on Wikipedia looked like.According to the article, MacMasters spent several months perfecting the design in a colleague’s lab before selling it for manufacture. MacMasters’ toaster was launched as the ‘Eclipse’. It had four electrical filaments built on a ceramic base. Electricity was provided by an adapter inserted between a lamp and a socket.
Incredibly, an inventor named MacMasters doesn’t actually exist. But many of these claims about him were based on publications that Wikipedia found acceptable, and were not questioned for years by any of Wikipedia’s (often zealous) editors.
When the man reported the situation to Wikipedia, it turned out to be an act of deliberately posting false information on the site. Research has revealed that the quotations are completely circular and that this page is actually a hoax from a bored student. They deliberately prepared the article as a hoax and tried to make the image look like it was from the 1890s with Photoshop.
The scam went undetected from February 2013 to July 2022. It was finally removed in July of this year, but the references remained attached.
Who is the real inventor of the toaster?
Speaking to toaster collectors in Europe and the US, as well as museum curators specializing in household appliances, the BBC says it’s very difficult to get an answer. According to multiple sources, the first patent for a commercially available and successful toaster was filed by Frank Shailor in 1909 on behalf of the US company General Electric.
Dubbed the D-12, the toaster is considered to be the first commercially available electric toaster.
D-12 electric toaster
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