April Fool's Day

Famous Hoaxes

Every year on April 1st individuals and organisations vie with each other to create the best hoaxes. Usually staid and reliable news sources suddenly become suspect and even adverts are sometimes less than truthful.

Most of these hoaxes are either unoriginal or unbelievable and disappear without trace. A few achieve legendary status. These are not necessarily the biggest but sometimes simply the most original or most unlikely. Here are a few of the all-time classic April Fool's Day japes. Well, they're my favourites anyway.:

1957: BBC Spaghetti Tree

1962: DIY Colour TV

1972: Write Only Memory

Dehydrated Water
Back in the 70s a UK television show (Nationwide?) ran a piece on "dehydrated water". When these little tablets were exposed to strong sunlight, the ultra-violet radiations caused the tablet to break down and react with the oxygen in the air to produce gallons of water.

Metric Time
A recurring April Fool that appears around the world every few years. The claim is that the Government is considering changing the time system to a metric one - for example, one hundred minutes in an hour. This hoax is made more believable by the fact that there have been a large number of perfectly serious and respectable suggestions for genuine metric time.

Biblical Pi
This was one of the first April Fool hoaxes to spread like wildfire across the internet. In 1998 it was "reported" that the state legislature of Alabama had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi to be precisely three in line with the Bible.

2005: New Neopets
Click for details

Of course, most of the best classic April Fool gags are from many years ago. Today we're more sophisticated. We'd never get caught out like that.

Would we?

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