On This Day - April 1st 1582
Today is April Fool's Day, a time of famous hoaxes and pranks.
Today is April Fool's Day, generally celebrated with hoaxes and practical jokes. It is possible that April Fool's Day originated in India with the celebration of the Spring equinox, where it was often marked by fooling people by sending them on fruitless errands. One school of thought suggests that it began around 1582 in France following the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, when New Year's Day was moved from March 25 - April 1 (New year's week) to January 1. There remains much dispute about the actual origins of the day.
Some popular hoaxes of April Fool's Day have been:
* In 1957, the BBC television program Panorama ran a hoax showing the Swiss harvesting spaghetti from trees. A lot of people called up wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti trees.
* In 1998, A Burger chain ran an ad in USA Today, saying that people could get a Burger for left-handed people, the contents of which were designed to drip out the right side. Thousands of customers went into restaurants to request the new burger.
* In 1965, the BBC purported to conduct a trial of "smellovision", a new technology allowing the transmission of odor over the airwaves to all viewers. Many viewers reportedly contacted the BBC to report the trial's success.
* In 1976, British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47am, the planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, causing a brief gravitational alignment that would counteract and reduce the Earth's own gravity. Listeners were told that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47am arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.
* One year, Dutch television news reported that the government had new technology to detect unlicensed televisions (in many European countries, television licence fees fund public broadcasting), but that wrapping a television in aluminium foil could prevent its detection. Within a few hours, aluminium foil was sold out throughout the country.
Australian identity Dick Smith has also been in on April Fool's Day hoaxes. In 1978, a barge appeared in Sydney Harbour towing a giant iceberg which Smith claimed to have come from Antarctica, and which he intended to carve up and sell for 10c per ice-cube as genuine Antarctic ice. The scheme was only revealed when rain washed away the firefighting foam and shaving cream of which the berg was really made, uncovering the white plastic sheets beneath.