Hi Friends,

Today is April 1st i.e. April Fools' Day, one of the several days that I enjoy a lot. I think nobody needs to know what people do on this day. But I feel everyone should know history behind this day to celebrate it to the fullest. So I am sharing the history of April Fools' Day and the reason why it is celebrated on this very day with all of you.

Previously, many cultures such as Hindus, Romans and Europeans used to celebrate the New Year's Day on sometime between March 20th and April 5th. This is generally the period of vernal equinox i.e. spring-period when the sun crosses the plane of the earth's equator and when day and night are of equal length. In the Julian calendar, April 1st was designated as the New Year's Day. This was followed till 1582. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII ordered the adoption of the new Gregorian Calendar, which specified January 1st as the New Year's Day.

However, communications being what they were in the days when news traveled by foot, many people did not receive the news for several years. Others, the more obstinate crowd, refused to accept the new calendar and continued to celebrate the new year on April 1. To support the previous statement, here are some examples: Scottish adopted the new calendar in 1660, Germans, Danish and Norwegians in 1700 and English in 1752.

The general populace labeled people who resisted the change as 'fools' and started playing pranks on them. They started sending them on 'fool's errands', sent them the fake invitations for parties and tricked them into believing something false.


Thus, April Fool's Day originated and was popularly celebrated in England and in the American colonies. It evolved and was caught on quickly throughout the world to trick each other and have fun. People play pranks on each other on this day in the memory of those tradition-obsessed 'fools'.


Following is perhaps the Best April Fool's Prank of the 20th century:

Alabama changes the value of Pi: The April 1998 newsletter of New Mexicans for Science and Reason contained an article written by physicist Mark Boslough claiming that the Alabama Legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant 'Pi' to 3.0. This claim originally appeared as a news story in the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.


Following are the top two pranks played by websites in 2008:

1. YouTube's RickRoll: Every link on the YouTube front page linked to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" video.

2. Google's Virgle: Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Virgin founder Richard Branson introduce a joint venture, Virgle, to explore the surface of Mars.


History always requires revision and can change each day with newly found proofs. But I hope all the above given information is, at least, close to the exact one.


External Links:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day

2. http://www.thefoolsday.com/