special re-release: Toasters

Secretly Incredibly Fascinating

Alex Schmidt

Society & Culture, Comedy, History

4.7 • 720 Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2022

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Breaking news: the entire Internet (except this podcast!) fell for a decade-long Wikipedia hoax about the invention of toasters. So please enjoy this re-release of our already-accurate ”Toasters” episode. Original air date: June 27th, 2022.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, folks, this is a re-release of a past episode, because believe it or not, there is breaking
0:05.8	Toaster News. Also, if you've been a SIFPod fan for more than a few months now, you've
0:11.7	probably heard this episode before. There's no new material other than me saying this, because
0:16.3	great news. We made an episode entirely about Toasters. It was the 100th episode of the podcast,
0:22.1	which is also fun. And the episode is, as far as I can tell, basically the only internet thing
0:28.9	about Toasters that did not spread a huge fake myth about them. So I'm bringing you exactly
0:35.2	the same episode because we got it right. I'm also going to link an
0:38.4	amazing BBC news piece about this hoax, because what happened is there was a teenager named
0:44.0	Alan McMasters, and Alan McMasters logged onto Wikipedia and declared himself the inventor of the
0:51.1	toaster. He claimed that he invented it in 1893. And there's no real
0:56.2	backing up of that or sourcing of that or any actual information about that. This also fooled
1:01.7	a lot more institutions than you would think. News articles repeated at some books got published
1:06.8	with that information in it. Apparently in 2018, the Bank of England asked the British public
1:12.2	who should appear on the next 50-pound note, and Alan McMasters got nominated based on a
1:19.0	Wikipedia article saying a Scottish guy named Alan McMasters invented the toaster.
1:23.5	Anyway, that myth got busted a couple weeks ago. November of 2022, a teenager reading Wikipedia
1:30.7	said, hey, is there anything to this? Can we check this? And apparently me and him and very
1:37.1	few other people bothered to check. And so I'm bump in this episode for you. This is also simply a
1:42.9	wonderful episode of SIFPOT, beyond being one of the only
1:45.8	things online that will tell you the truth about where Toasters came from. Very good guests on this
1:50.2	Mujan Zol Fagari, who's a comedian and podcast around stuff like Mission to Zix. Kimberly Clark,
1:55.4	who's a wonderful stand-up comedian, has a special on Netflix. So please enjoy this episode of
	...

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