HAD THE SCOTS EVEN INVENTED BREAD YET?:

For more than a decade, a prankster spun a web of deception about the inventor of the electric toaster. His lies fooled newspapers, teachers and officials. Then a teenager flagged up something that everyone else had missed.

"I read through Wikipedia a lot when I'm bored in class," says Adam, aged 15, who studies photography and ICT at a school in Kent.

One day last July, one of his teachers mentioned the online encyclopaedia's entry about Alan MacMasters, who it said was a Scottish scientist from the late 1800s and had invented "the first electric bread toaster".

At the top of the page was a picture of a man with a pronounced quiff and long sideburns, gazing contemplatively into the distance - apparently a relic of the 19th Century, the photograph appeared to have been torn at the bottom.

But Adam was suspicious. "It didn't look like a normal photo," he tells me. "It looked like it was edited."

After he went home, he decided to post about his suspicions on a forum devoted to Wikipedia vandalism.

Little did he know that he had just set in motion a chain of events that would lead me to "Alan MacMasters" - not the inventor of the electric toaster, but his real-life alter ego.

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