The Invention of The Inventor of The Toaster
On the fluidity of truth, and the snakes who ate my puzzle
Past
My Nan always made her toast using the grill.
The grill was exciting compared to normal life at home, where the toaster did all the work for you. The grill was different, it required human intervention, and we ate the many rounds of toast she grilled for us sat at the tiny table in her kitchen.
If there were ever any leftover slices they were fed to the bush outside, which was a sentient character, a sort of overgrown hedge demon I think. The bush was always hungry and always willing to hoover up any scraps that came its way.
There were also snakes in my Nan’s central heating, although years later these were revealed to have been my Aunt and Uncle in disguised voices, shouting through the air vent in the bathroom, with the sound carrying through to an air vent in the living room.
As the snakes could answer any questions I posed and knew intimate details about my life (such as the fact we were missing a puzzle piece, which I came to suspect they had stolen and subsequently consumed), I viewed them as immensely intelligent creatures, possibly even Gods.
When I began to suspect that my Aunt was the animating force behind the snakes, I asked her to sit beside me when I next contacted them. The fact that the subterranean serpents continued to respond despite the ingenious trap I had set them proved their existence (and Godhood) beyond any doubt.
What I had failed to account for was the fact that someone other than my Aunt would also be able to pull the same trick. The various adults in the house took it in turns portraying the central heating snakes, thereby creating a serpentine impersonation chain which made it impossible to identify any individual suspect as the voice of the creatures.
As far as I’m aware no such similar explanation has ever been put forward as to how the bush managed to thank my Nan for the burnt crusts she threw its way.
Present
We’ve been using the grill in our flat to make our toast for the past six months because, like my Nan, we haven’t had a toaster. It is far more user-intensive than using a toaster, because if you forget about your bread for a minute too long you end up with a blackened wreck, unfit for anything but feeding to sentient shrubbery.
It has been nice to reminisce each time I fancied a snack about ancient times spent conversing with various magical creatures (my Nan included), but the time had come for us to join the 21st century and install a toaster. We’ve had it for four days and I estimate that we have used it twenty times.
Breakfast on New Year’s Day (beans on toast, the perfect curtain raiser). Pitta breads, bagels, sourdough. Anything wheat-based we could get our hands on. My baguettes are too fat to fit in or they’d be getting the treatment too.
Sliced bread is the cliche ‘greatest thing’, but it wouldn’t be half so great without the humble toaster.
The toaster also highlighted our insatiable appetite for snacking. Somehow, when we were using the oven grill it seemed like we were engaging in a more substantial genre of cooking for our toast. Creating the facade that there was a level of skill required.
One of the great things about the toaster is the prodigious lack of skill needed by any user, but it did make starker the sheer amount of toast we get through.
Click, pop, crunch. Click, pop, crunch… and so on…
I wonder how many people in the world have consumed more slices of toast than me. I wonder how many people in the world have written more essays about toasters than me.
There are so many creative, unique things in the world that there are loads of things you will have done that no other person will have done more of. Even if that thing is eating slices of toast.
Even if that thing is the number of times you have walked along the particular piece of pavement outside your house. Even if that thing is hours spent watching videos of people playing Tetris. We are all the Strava segment kings and queens of something in our lives. It can be nice to think about that sometimes.
There will be a toaster out there, too, which has popped the most slices of toast, but that is not the point of the toaster. The point of the toaster is that you drop in the bread and it pops out the toast, pretty much the same as it has done every other time some bread was dropped in. The point of the toaster is not to win, or to be unique, or to try anything untowardly fancy.
Like Ken in Barbie (2024), the point of the toaster is toast.
Plug
In Gavin and Stacey, there is a scene where Smithy is running the local pub quiz. He gets free beers from the bar and is getting quite monumentally sloshed (he attempts to drive his car home at the end, something which is always shockingly normalised in film and TV, but that’s something for another essay) while repeatedly asking questions to which the answer is Gary Lineker.
It’s a great scene, from back when Gavin and Stacey wasn't an AI-generated hodge-podge of mawkish nostalgia-bait, but again, that's by the by.
One of the non-Gary Lineker questions he asks relates to the transfer fee Wigan received for Benoit Assou-Ekotto when he moved to Spurs the previous summer. I've always remembered that the answer to this is £2.5m, despite the fact it isn't mentioned in the episode, so I must have looked it up at some point.
Why I have retained this secret nugget of Gavin and Stacey lore I don't know. But that isn't why I'm talking about Gavin and Stacey either.
No, the reason I'm talking about Gavin and Stacey is because who invented the plug?
Who invented the plug?
It's one of the other questions in the pub quiz.
One which I never Googled the answer to.
I have however just googled a similar question - who invented the toaster?
I'll get into the history of the toaster in a moment. For now, let's close the loop on the one question from Smithy's pub quiz I don't know the answer to.
Here goes, the plug was invented in 1904 by Harvey Hubbell.
The BBC article which tells me this also says "[An iPod… even a microwave; items which would surely be anomalies in our lives without the plug.]"
I get what this sentence is trying to get across, but what an odd way of saying it.
What do you mean they would be anomalies? You've got me questioning whether I know what the word anomaly means. (For reference, it is "something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected.")
Are you saying, old BBC article, that there exists the possibility of a world where there are no household electronics other than the iPod, rendering the iPod an anomaly? Making it an object of mythical fascination and suspicion, an object of pure, real magic.
A world in which humanity has somehow contrived to design and build an iPod despite the absence of plugs. A device which cannot be connected to a laptop in order to fill it with songs, because of course the laptop has not been invented. The modern PC has not been invented, the phone has not been invented. The only thing that has been invented is the iPod. A device which is miraculously filled with music despite the fact MP3 files haven’t been invented, despite the fact that there is no way of recharging it.
A true anomaly. Like landing a spaceship in front of a Neanderthal.
But I'm getting sidetracked by pedantry, so let's move on to another object which would surely be an anomaly but for the invention of the plug.
Propagation
First, though, I'm going to tell you who didn't invent the toaster.
The toaster was not invented by a man named Alan MacMasters.
In 2012, a mischievous gang of students at the University of Surrey edited the Wikipedia page for the electric toaster, claiming that it had been invented by one Alan MacMasters.
They did this in response to their teacher warning them about the use of Wikipedia as a source, because one of the teacher’s friends, Maddy Kennedy, had previously edited the same page to say that they had invented it themselves, giving us the name of a second person who definitively did not invent the toaster.
The Alan MacMasters lie propagated prodigiously and was not uncovered for more than a decade when a Redditor surmised that the image of MacMasters might have been digitally altered. He checked and was right, it was a photo of the vandal himself, edited to look like it had been taken in the olden days. By which I mean it had been converted to black and white and made to look like it had been torn in half (to hide some obviously modern clothing).
Alan MacMasters had made quite the name for himself in the intervening ten years, with schools and museums repeatedly using his Wikipedia page as a reference. Someone nominated him to appear on the £50 banknote, and a school in Scotland spent a lesson imagining a day in the life of Alan.
It is as though I, at the tender age of five, had logged onto my Dad’s laptop and written a beatific treatise on the puzzle-munching reptile residents of my relative’s radiators. And for this essay to have been picked up by major news outlets and roundly believed by anyone who read it. And for a drawing of the snakes to have ended up on the back of a newly minted five pence piece.
As the article I was reading about the Alan MacMasters hoax was on Wikipedia, I had to remain sceptical of everything that was being said - was I party to a double-bluff of baffling proportions? The kind of conspiratorial genius usually only seen in central-heating-snake-based japes.
It seems not, because all of the sources referenced checked out, and there is a PDF on the Bank of England website confirming that Alan MacMasters was one of 989 names which were granted eligibility for genuine consideration (out of 227,299 which were submitted).
Posterity
So who *did* invent the toaster?
Crompton and Company invented the toaster, in 1893 which is the same year Alan MacMasters fictitiously invented it. Coincidence, or what?
Crompton and Company were founded by Colonel Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton, which is quite the name. Because of the whole misinformation trap, I'm now starting to question whether this man even existed, despite the fact that many websites attest to his existence. We have seen already how unreliable they can be.
If you want a sense of the scale of the MacMasters hoax, there is still an article on a website called Toaster.blog which cites MacMasters as the inventor of the toaster. That’s toaster dot blog. The flipping toaster people!
The Internet says that Crompton wrote an autobiography called Reminiscences and if I was truly committed to infallible authenticity in this newsletter (which of course I am, but maybe not to this extent) then should I be hunting down and reading said autobiography?
I've satisfied myself with the fact that this book one hundred percent exists, so it is very likely that Crompton was a real person (who else could have written his autobiography?).
Paramnesia
Furthermore, and as if you weren’t already distrustful enough, you can't even believe the information that is inside your own head.
Benoit Assou-Ekotto never played for Wigan, nor did he move for a transfer fee of £2.5m.
It was £3.5m and he came from Lens.
All that can be truly trusted is toast.