Member-only story
Books are the Last Resort for Human Insight
AI is clogging the internet and soon our bookshelves as well
The toaster. A humble device that has silently revolutionized our everyday lives. Every morning when the first sunlight floods their bedrooms, millions of people stumble into their kitchen half asleep, place a piece of bread into the magical appliance and wait for a crisp, perfectly brown slice to emerge and complement their peanut butter or jam.
But who was the genius inventor behind this device, the person who permanently altered our breakfast landscape? The person who — according to absolutely no serious historian — has shaped the course of history forever? Do you happen to know?
If not, don’t worry. Neither did major news outlets, the Scottish government, or a US museum. Or any person relying on the corresponding Wikipedia article, for that matter.
In 2012, a group of British students was bored during a lecture and came up with an interesting way of having some innocent fun: They edited the Wikipedia article about the electric toaster to claim that one of them, a man called Alan MacMasters, had invented the toaster back in 1893. To their surprise, the change was accepted.
Fueled by their success, they later created an entire, completely made-up Wikipedia page on MacMasters himself, including plenty of fake biographical details. This page featured an absolute masterpiece (or shall I say MacMasterpiece) of photo-editing, a black-and-white filtered version of a photograph they took of the student:
The result? The article was online for more than a decade, a primary school came up with a celebration day for MacMasters, and numerous news articles cited him as the inventor of the toaster.
This is a striking example of how history can be created out of nothing: The students didn’t even put much effort into faking the photo because it was supposed to be a joke — but thanks to this lack of effort, a Reddit user got suspicious about the article and sparked an investigation which eventually lead to its deletion.
