John Hetherington is an apocryphal English haberdasher. A frequently republished story from the late nineteenth century claims that in 1797 he invented the top hat and caused a riot by wearing it in public in London. However, top hats appeared in English fashion as early as the 1780s.
In 1899 the quarterly London journal Notes and Queries published a letter by a Richard H. Thornton of Portland, Oregon, quoting a "note from a recent number of the Hatters' Gazette". The note supposedly claims Hetherington as having decided to wear his invention of a "silk hat" in public on the 15th of January 1797 with the intention to "cause a sensation" only to be surrounded by a "howling mob".
The note claims to quote an unnamed gazette as having reported the following day that
The note concludes by claiming to quote a comment in The Times published on 16 January 1797 approving of the hat and stating that it was "destined to work a revolution in headgear".