April Fool's Day: History, Pranks and a Google Name Swap

Psych!

Internet-users woke this morning to find the Google homepage with a new name: Topeka. The search-engine giant announced it was changing it's name as part of an elaborate April Fool's Day joke. Here are some other great April Fool's Day pranks, along with a little history.

April Fool's Day history is as murky as it gets, with everyone claiming their own theory and hardly anyone agreeing on its exact origins. Either way, celebrations (including countless jokes and pranks) date back over 500 years.

Most historians point to a misreading of a date in Geoffrey Chaucer's classic The Canterbury Tales (1392), in which one character is tricked by another. Others believe traditions stem from a series of poets and noblemen who made reference to the holiday, or during the Middle Ages when people who celebrated the New Year on April 1st were ridiculed by those who celebrated January 1st.

Still, no matter where it comes from, the holiday has given us centuries of great practical jokes to laugh at. There are too many every year to name, so here is a short sampling of some classics.

1998: Burger King takes out an ad in USA Today saying it would sell special left-handed burgers, which were designed to have condiments spill out of the right side.

1976: An astronomer told listeners of BBC radio that the alignment of two planets had caused a strange disturbance in gravity, and told people to jump up and feel like they were floating. Many listeners called in exclaiming it worked.

1998: Alabama lawmakers vote to change the value of pi.

1997: Alex Trebek and Pat Sajak switch hosting duties for Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune.

1957: A British tv program reports that Italians were harvesting spaghetti from trees, causing people to call in and ask how to grow their own.

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