The Pranking Industry

To annoy you, half the words are in black. :P
On April fools, thousands of children across the world are, in a split second, respected, admired, and hated.
But how did this day come to be/ Lets find out through an article from Wikipedia;
"In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1392), the "Nun's Priest's Tale" is set Syn March bigan thritty dayes and two. Modern scholars believe that there is a copying error in the extant manuscripts and that Chaucer actually wrote, Syn March was gon. Thus the passage originally meant 32 days after March, i.e. May 2, the anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia, which took place in 1381. However, readers apparently misunderstood this line to mean "32nd of March," i.e. 1st April. In Chaucer's tale, the vain cock Chauntecleer is tricked by a fox.

In 1509, a French poet referred to a poisson d’avril (April fool, literally "April fish"), a possible reference to the holiday. In 1539, Flemish poet Eduard de Dene wrote of a nobleman who sent his servants on foolish errands on the 1st of April. In 1686, John Aubrey referred to the holiday as "Fooles holy day", the first British reference. On 1st April, 1698, several people were tricked into going to the Tower of London to "see the Lions washed". The name "April Fools" echoes that of the Feast of Fools, a Medieval holiday held on the 28th December.
In the Middle Ages, New Year's Day was celebrated on the 25th of March in most European towns. In some areas of France, New Year's was a week-long holiday ending on the 1st of April. So it is possible that April Fools originated because those who celebrated on the 1st of January made fun of those who celebrated on other dates The use of the 1st of January as New Year's Day was common in France by the mid-sixteenth century, and this date was adopted officially in 1564 by the Edict of Roussillon."

As you probably guessed, there are records of the worlds nastiest pranks ever. Well, here they are:

• Write-only memory: Signetics advertised write-only memory (WOM) IC databooks in 1972 through the late 1970s.
• Decimal time: Repeated several times in various countries, this hoax involves claiming that the time system will be changed to one in which units of time are based on powers of 10.
• Taco Liberty Bell: In 1996, Taco Bell took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times announcing that they had purchased the Liberty Bell to "reduce the country's debt" and renamed it the "Taco Liberty Bell". When asked about the sale, White House press secretary Mike McCurry replied tongue-in-cheek that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold and would henceforth be known as the Lincoln Mercury Memorial.
• Left-handed Whoppers: In 1998, Burger King ran an ad in USA Today, saying that people could get a Whopper for left-handed people whose condiments were designed to drip out of the right side. Not only did customers order the new burgers, but some specifically requested the "old", right-handed burger.
• Apple buys the Beatles: Bob Lefsetz released an April Fools' Day letter which had rumours circulating around the music industry.
• In 1983, Australian millionaire businessman Dick Smith claimed to have towed an iceberg from Antarctica to Sydney Harbour. He used a barge covered with white plastic and fire extinguisher foam to convince witnesses.

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• Jovian-Plutonian gravitational effect: In 1976, British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore told listeners of BBC Radio 2 that unique alignment of two planets would result in an upward gravitational pull making people lighter at precisely 9:47 a.m. that day. He invited his audience to jump in the air and experience "a strange floating sensation". Dozens of listeners phoned in to say the experiment had worked.

• Space Shuttle lands in San Diego: In 1993, DJ Dave Rickards told listeners of KGB-FM in San Diego that Space Shuttle Discovery had been diverted from Edwards Air Force Base and would be landing at Montgomery Field, a small municipal airport with a 4,577 foot runway. Thousands of people went to the airport to watch the purported landing, causing traffic jams throughout Kearny Mesa. Moreover, there wasn't even a shuttle in orbit at the time.
• Death of a mayor: In 1998, local WAAF shock jocks Opie and Anthony reported that Boston mayor Thomas Menino had been killed in a car accident. Menino happened to be on a flight at the time, lending credence to the prank as he could not be reached. The rumor spread quickly across the city, eventually causing news stations to issue alerts denying the hoax. The pair were fired shortly thereafter.
• Phone call: In 1998, UK presenter Nic Tuff of West Midlands radio station pretended to be the British Prime Minister Tony Blair when he called the then South African President Nelson Mandela for a chat. It was only at the end of the call when Nic asked Nelson what he was doing for April Fools' Day that the line went dead.
• BBC Radio 4 (2005): The Today Programme announced in the news that the long-running serial The Archers had changed their theme tune to an upbeat disco style.
• National Public Radio: Every year, National Public Radio in the United States does an extensive news story on April 1. These usually start off more or less reasonably, and get more and more unusual. A recent example is the story on the "iBod," a portable body control device. In 2008 it reported that the IRS, to assure rebate checks were actually spent, was shipping consumer products instead of checks. It also runs false sponsor mentions, such as "Support for NPR comes from the Soylent Corporation, manufacturing protein-rich food products in a variety of colors. Soylent Green is People".
• Three-dollar coin: In 2008, the CBC Radio program As It Happens interviewed a Royal Canadian Mint spokesman who broke "news" of plans to replace the Canadian five-dollar bill with a three-dollar coin. The coin was dubbed a "threenie", in line with the nicknames of the country's one-dollar coin (commonly called a "loonie" due to its depiction of a common loon on the reverse) and two-dollar coin ("toonie").
• Country to metal: Country and gospel WIXE in Monroe, North Carolina does a prank every year. In 2009, midday host Bob Rogers announced he was changing his show to heavy metal. This resulted in numerous phone calls, but about half were from listeners wanting to request a song.
• U2 live on rooftop in Cork: In 2009, hundreds of U2 fans were duped in an elaborate prank when they rushed to a shopping centre in Cork believing that the band were playing a surprise rooftop concert. The prank was organised by Cork radio station RedFM. The band were in fact just a tribute band called U2opia.
• Cellphone ban: In New Zealand, the radio station The Edge's Morning Madhouse enlisted the help of the Prime Minister on April 1st to inform the entire country that cellphones are to be banned in New Zealand. Hundreds of callers rang in disgruntled at the new law.citation needed

• Tower of Pisa: The Dutch television news reported in the 1950s that the Tower of Pisa had fallen over. Many shocked people contacted the station.citation needed
• Spaghetti trees: The BBC television programme Panorama ran a famous hoax in 1957, showing Swiss harvesting spaghetti from trees. They had claimed that the despised pest, the spaghetti weevil, had been eradicated. A large number of people contacted the BBC wanting to know how to cultivate their own spaghetti trees. It was, in fact, filmed in St Albans.
• In 1962, the Swedish national television did a 5-minute special on how one could get color TV by placing a nylon stocking in front of the TV. A rather in-depth description on the physics behind the phenomenon was included.
• Smell-o-vision: In 1965, the BBC purported to conduct a trial of 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 2007, the BBC website repeated an online version of the hoax.
• TV license fee evasion discovery: In 1969, the Dutch TV news notified the public of a new device that would be handed out to civil servants tasked with finding TV license fee evaders. This device would be able to detect the presence of a television set in the house from the outside. Asked whether there was nothing that citizens could do about this, the interviewed "civil servant" said 'No', as - he said - it would be unlikely that people would be willing to wrap their TVs in aluminum foil. The next day aluminum foil was sold out in most stores in a matter of hours.
• In 1980, the BBC reported a proposed change to the famous clock tower known as Big Ben. The reporters stated that the clock would go digital.
• In 1989, a fight broke out on air between staff in the newsroom behind presenter Des Lynam on the BBC sports programme, Grandstand. This was later revealed to be an April Fool's Day joke
• On Comedy Central, the creators of South Park aired a fake episode of Terrance and Phillip titled "Terrance and Phillip in Not Without My Anus" instead of running the season premiere which was supposed to reveal the father of Eric Cartman. This caused angered fans to write about 2,000 complaints to Comedy Central in the week following the broadcast. The incident was parodied in the Season 13 episode "Eat, Pray, Queef", the first episode to broadcast on April Fool's Day since the incident.
• The Trouble with Tracy: In 2003, The Comedy Network in Canada announced that it would produce and air a remake of the 1970s Canadian sitcom The Trouble with Tracy, widely considered to be one of the worst sitcoms ever produced. Series star Diane Nyland Procter even gave interviews and press conferences promoting the alleged "revival", and several media outlets fell for the hoax.
• In 2004, British breakfast show GMTV produced a story claiming that Yorkshire Water were trialing a new 'diet tap water' that had already helped one customer lose a stone and a half in four months. After heralding the trial as successful, it was claimed that a third tap would be added to kitchen sinks, allowing customers easy access to the water. Following the story, Yorkshire Water received 10,000 enquiries from viewers.
• In 2004, the Italian television station Rai 2 reported that NASA discovered crude oil on Mars.
• In 2006, the same station reported the invention of a miraculous diet pill that should be accompanied to a diet rich of fish.
• In 2006, the BBC reported that the door to No. 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, had been painted red. They showed footage of workmen carrying a red door. Red was the official colour of the political party which formed the government at the time. The same story was also reported in the British newspaper, The Daily Mail which credited the new design to April Fewell. The door is in fact black.
• In 2008, the BBC reported on a newly discovered colony of flying penguins. An elaborate video segment was even produced, featuring Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) walking with the penguins in Antarctica, and following their flight to the Amazon rainforest.
• In 2008, Nick at Nite made a joke suggesting that it would disappear forever. This was seen on a few of Nick at Nite's promos for its April Fools Day marathon.
• In 2010, The One Show did a part on "Cloned Unicorns" and then revealed that it was an April Fool's Day joke.citation needed
• In 2010, Tony Kornheiser and Dan LeBatard of ESPN's Pardon the Interruption reported that at the Masters tournament, which began that day, Tiger Woods had requested that the news media refer to him by his given name of Eldrick in an attempt to distance himself further from his recent personal difficulties. The hosts then debated the advantages and disadvantages before revealing that the story was a joke.

 Finally, what was thought to be hoaxes bt turned out to be true:

• The April 1, 1946 Aleutian Island earthquake tsunami that killed 165 people in Hawaii and Alaska resulted in the creation of a tsunami warning system, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre, established in 1949 for Pacific Ocean countries. The tsunami in question is known in Hawaii as the "April Fools' Day Tsunami" due to people drowning because of the assumptions that the warnings were an April Fools' prank.
• The death of King George II of Greece was on April 1, 1947.
• The AMC Gremlin was first introduced on April 1, 1970.
• In 1979, Iran declared April 1 its national Republic Day. Thirty-one years on, this continues to be mistaken for a joke.
• On April 1, 1984, singer Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his father. Originally, people assumed that it was a fake news story, especially considering the bizarre aspect of the father being the murderer.
• On April 1, 1991, news emerged that David Icke, the British sports reporter, had announced that he was the son of God and that the world was about to end in an apocalypse. Not surprisingly, many people took the reports as an April Fool. Icke has, however, continued to expound his views.
• On April 1, 1993, NASCAR Winston Cup Series Champion Alan Kulwicki was killed in a plane crash involving Hooters of America executives in Blountville, Tennessee near the Tri-Cities Airport. The party were travelling to the Food City 500 qualifying scheduled for the next day.
• The suicide death of Deathrock legend Rozz Williams was on April 1, 1998.
• On April 1, 1999, the Canadian Northwest Territories was split, and the territory now known as Nunavut came to be.
• On April 1, 2002, WWE Raw changed logos.
• The merger of Square and its rival company, Enix, took place on April 1, 2003, and was originally thought to be a joke.
• Leslie Cheung, a famous singer and actor from Hong Kong, committed suicide in 2003 due to severe depression.
• Gmail's April 1, 2004 launch was widely believed to be a prank, as Google traditionally perpetrates April Fools' Day hoaxes each April 1, and the announced 1GB online storage was at the time vastly more than existing online email services (see Google's hoaxes.) Another Google-related event that turned out not to be a hoax occurred on April 1, 2007, when employees at Google's New York City office were alerted that a ball python kept in an engineer's cubicle had escaped and was on the loose. An internal e-mail acknowledged that "the timing…could not be more awkward" but that the snake's escape was in fact an actual occurrence and not a prank.
• The 2005 death of comedian Mitch Hedberg was originally dismissed as an April Fools' joke. The comedian's March 29, 2005 death was announced on March 31, but many newspapers did not carry the story until April 1, 2005.
• On April 1, 2007, the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid book came out.
• British sprinter Dwain Chambers joined English rugby league team Castleford Tigers shortly before April 1, 2008. The athlete was attempting a return to top flight athletics at the time following a high profile drugs ban, and his apparent unfamiliarity with rugby led many people to assume this was an April Fools' Day prank.
• On April 1, 2008, it was reported that UEFA would require the Swedish fast food chain Max to close their restaurant at the Borås Arena during the European Under-21 Football Championship due to a conflict with official sponsor McDonald's and a requirement that only official sponsors may operate around the arena. The arena was later replaced as a tournament site.
• On April 1, 2008, Persch announced that the GNOME desktop web browser Epiphany would be switched from Mozilla's Gecko engine to the WebKit engine used by Safari and KDE's equivalent application Konqueror.
• On April 1, 2009, Alan Shearer became caretaker manager of Newcastle United.
• On April 1, 2009, CBS announced the cancellation of the daytime drama Guiding Light after 72 years, with the final episode airing September 18, 2009.
• Also, on April 1, 2009, a Virus/Worm called Confucker was released in December 2008 but reports about its spread to millions of computers, releasing personal info and deleting files came out on April 1st. This was supposed to be a joke, but random computers throughout America were hit. Before this happened, news media like NBC, Fox News, ABC and CBS told the viewers to install firewalls and updates to their Windows computers before it hit.
• On April 1, 2010, Sony Computer Entertainment released Firmware 3.21 for the Sony PlayStation 3. This firmware disabled the "Other OS" feature on all PlayStation 3 models. The "Other OS" feature had allowed customers to use the PlayStation 3 as a full fledged computer running Linux. Because the "upgrade" occurred on April 1, many people thought that it was a joke.
• On April 1, 2010, Charlie Sheen announced he was considering leaving Two and a Half Men.