Everyone knows that penguins can swim, slide and waddle around. But an April 2008 promotional video for BBC nature documentaries used computer animation to show a colony of airborne penguins migrating from the Antarctic to a tropical rainforest.

A Swedish April Fools’ joke in 1962 convinced some viewers that they could convert their black-and-white TV sets to color sets. An “expert” reported on Sweden’s TV station that nylon stockings stretched properly over the screen could bend the light enough to produce color. Thousands searched drawers for nylon stockings, producing not color but angry women.

Hoping to expand time itself, Timex watches introduced a bogus 25th Hour Watch in April 2019. Timex, the ad said, “has done the impossible. Imagine if you could add one hour to every day for the rest of your life.” The ad showed various 25-hour watch faces.

On April 1, 1966, ever-puckish John Lennon convinced Ringo Starr that there would be an eclipse that afternoon. Starr spent the rest of the day on London’s Primrose Hill waiting to see it. The following year, Paul McCartney turned the gag into the now-classic song, “The Fool on the Hill.”

As the internet was just gaining popularity, the April 1994 issue of PC Computing ran a column by John C. Dvorak about a nonexistent Senate bill “designed to prohibit anyone from using a public computer network while the computer user is intoxicated.” Dvorak said some clueless senators thought the so-called Information Superhighway was “an actual road.”

This joke is timeless, and nuisances at zoos on April 1 were reported as far back as 1919. On April Fools’ Day, people get tricked into calling their local zoo, asking for a specific person. On April 1, 1955, the Bronx Zoo reported 1,427 calls for Mr. Lyon, 630 calls for Mr. Wolf, 613 calls for Mrs. Fox and 499 calls for Miss Bear.

In 1965, astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom and John Young made history by blasting off on NASA’s first two-man space mission, Gemini 3. It was also the first instance of space smuggling: Fellow astronaut Wally Schirra convinced Young to sneak a whoopee cushion aboard in his spacesuit. Once in orbit, Young took it out and informed Grissom that he wished he hadn’t eaten so much freeze-dried food while casually ejecting air from the novelty device.

The presidency of Franklin Pierce (1853–57) is largely forgotten, but it did feature a memorable bit of history: the first known April Fools’ prank in the White House. Presented with a stack of legislation to sign into law, Pierce failed to notice that one (slipped in by Vice President William King) was the “Clod-Dullard Act,” which named King’s schnauzer Zeus postmaster general. Since the act hadn’t been passed by Congress it was unenforceable, so Zeus never ruled over mail carriers.