April Fool's Day Archive, Contents:

Hundreds of people, mostly shop girls and women, gathered in front of the Brandenburg gate in Berlin, drawn there by an announcement placed in Berlin papers the night before stating that a motion picture camera was going to take a picture in front of the gate at noon, and that everybody who was in front of the gate would be in the picture. The announcement was a prank perpetrated by a night worker at the papers. The Chicago Tribune foreign news service reported: "Some people stood there for hours before they realized that this was the first day of April, known in Germany as in the United States as April Fools' day." [Chicago Daily Tribune, Apr 5, 1919.]

Readers of the Boston Morning Globe could have purchased their papers for half the cost on April Fool's Day, if they had been alert. The price listed on the front page had been lowered from "Two Cents Per Copy" to "One Cent." But almost 60,000 copies of the paper were sold before anyone noticed the unannounced price change. When the management of the Globe found out about the change, they were just as surprised as everyone else. The new price turned out to be the responsibility of a mischievous production worker who had surreptitiously inserted the lower value at the last minute as the paper went to print.

The Kokomo Dispatch reported that a Kokomo man had invented a perpetual motion machine. Hundreds of people flocked to the factory where the machine was said to be on exhibition, only to be told it was "one of Goof Havens' fool jokes." Havens was the editorial writer for the Dispatch.

The San Diego Union reported that two hunters had killed a bizarre, half-human half-animal beast in an out-of-the-way location called Deadman's Hole northwest of San Diego. The creature, it was said, was responsible for a string of gruesome murders.

The creature was said to have the body of a bear, but it stood upright like a man and had a human face. The Union provided a graphic account of its death: "Cox, who is a wonderful shot with a rifle, brought his weapon to his shoulder and fired. With a cry like that of a human being the beast instantly fell in a hideous heap across a boulder that it was in the act of scaling." Then the hunters discovered the creature's lair where the bones of its human victims lay piled in a heap.

The article theorized that the animal was the result of a cross between a man and some kind of carnivorous beast. It said that the hunters planned to bring the body to San Diego for public exhibit within a few days.

The article caused a minor sensation in San Diego, and many people inquired where the creature would be displayed. Of course, there was no monster of Deadman's Hole, outside of the imagination of the Union's staff.

After Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, Americans were quite willing to believe there was no limit to his genius. They were sure he could solve any problem he focused his powerful mind on. Therefore, when the New York Graphic announced in 1878 that Edison had invented a machine capable of transforming soil directly into cereal and water directly into wine, thereby ending the problem of world hunger, it found a willing audience of believers.

Newspapers throughout America copied the article unquestioningly and heaped lavish praise on Edison. The conservative Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, in particular, waxed eloquent about Edison's genius in an editorial that dwelled upon the good fortune of a man like Edison having been born in the progressive nineteenth century when his genius could be appreciated. "Let steady-going people whose breath has been taken away by the pace we seem to be driving at just now, take heart therefore," it declared. "And be thankful that the genius of true benefactors of the race, like Edison, cannot now be crippled and blighted by superstition and bigotry, as it was when Galileo was forced to recant the awful heresy that two and two make four."

The New York Graphic took the liberty of reprinting the Advertiser's credulous editorial in full. Above the article it placed a single, gloating headline: "They Bite!"

On March 31, 1864, the Evening Star of Islington announced that a grand exhibition of donkeys would be held the following day at the Agricultural Hall. Early the next day a large crowd assembled there to see the parade. Only gradually did it dawn on them that they themselves were the donkeys.

Reported in the Weekly Hawk-Eye (Burlington, Iowa), Apr 20, 1858:

On an undetermined April 1 in the 1840s, a story appeared in the Boston Post announcing that a cave full of treasure had been discovered beneath Boston Common. It had supposedly been uncovered by workmen as they removed a tree from the Common. As the tree fell, it revealed a stone trap-door with a large iron ring set in it. Beneath the door was a stone stairway that led to an underground cave. In this cave lay piles of jewels, old coins, and weapons with jeweled handles. As word of the discovery spread throughout Boston, parties of excited curiosity-seekers began marching out across the Common to view the treasure. A witness later described the scene: "It was rainy, that 1st of April, the Legislature was in session, and it was an animated scene that the Common presented, roofed with umbrellas, sheltering pilgrims on their way to the new-found sell. A procession of grave legislators marched solemnly down under their green gingham, while philosophers, archaeologists, numismatists, antiquarians of all qualities, and the public generally paid tribute to the Post's ingenuity." Of course, the Common was empty of all jewel-bearing caverns, as the crowd of treasure seekers eventually discovered to its disappointment.