Taco Bell Bought the Liberty Bell—April Fool

The Liberty Bell was part of an elaborate April Fool’s Day hoax 21 years ago when Taco Bell officials said they bought the symbol of America’s freedom. The fast food chain claimed that the company’s name was changed to Taco Liberty Bell.   

The company placed full-page advertisements in seven leading U.S. newspapers on April 1, 1996, announcing the purchase. The newspaper story claimed that the company purchased the national icon to help reduce the country’s national debt.

Thousands of people overloaded national telephone lines when they called Taco Bell headquarters and the National Park Service to find out if the story was true. The curious callers realized they fell for an April Fool’s Day prank when recorded radio spots placed in major markets repeatedly disclosed the joke after 1p.m.

The Liberty Bell was commissioned in 1752 by the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly. Pennsylvania owns the bell and the park service acts as a custodian and protector of the bell. It’s housed in the city’s Liberty Bell Center inside Independence National Historical Park. To learn more about the Liberty Bell, you can visit my previous blog post, Liberty Bell: Once Sold for Scrap Metal.

The April Fool’s hoax was a financial success for the fast food corporation. The campaign cost about $300,000.00 and generated an estimated $25 million worth of publicity, according to the David Paine Co. Now called Citizens Relations, the large advertising firm was hired to spearhead the hoax. Taco Bell claimed a $1 million jump in business during the first two days of the April joke.

“Entrepreneur Magazine” lists the hoax among the top 100 April Fool’s Day tricks of all time. And The Museum of Hoaxes, the source of a popular website since 1997, ranks it number four on its list of top April 1st gags. The museum has its headquarters in San Diego, CA. Historical deceptions dating from the Middle Ages up to the present are illustrated inside the museum.

Timing of the Taco Liberty Bell stunt helped make it successful. It was a time before false and deceptive information became a daily part of the internet. David Paine, founder and owner of the advertising company, often spoke about the success of the Taco Bell campaign. According to Paine, people trusted news that came from well-known, national advertisers such as the Taco Bell Co. during the time of the hoax.  Since then the internet has become a source of scams and false information. According to Paine, the influences and easy access to the internet make the public much more cynical. The number of people believing such a gag would be much smaller today.  

Interested in learning more about April Fool's Day? Check out my blog post: The Beginning of April Fool's Day.

Enjoy your April Fool's Day this weekend, and watch out for hoaxes!

Life on Earth Died Long Before Dinosaurs Dominated the Planet

They were the largest land animals that ever roamed the Earth. Dinosaurs inhabited most of Earth’s landmass before going extinct about 65 million years ago.   

Dinosaurs had an extraordinary history. They lived about 160 million years as the dominate life forms on the planet. They became extinct after a major climate change affected Earth. But an even larger earth-wide extinction wiped out most life forms about 90 million years before dinosaurs walked the planet. Nearly all life on Earth disappeared during a period called The Great Dying.

About 252 million years ago, give or take a million years, most terrestrial vertebrates (air breathing animals with spines) disappeared from Earth. It’s dubbed The Great Dying because at least 70 percent of land animals and 96 percent of all marine species died.  

Officially known as the Permian-Triassic (PT) Extinction event, it predated the existence of dinosaurs by millions of years. The PT theory was often ridiculed by the scientific community when it was first discussed by paleontologists in the 1950s. However, evidence supporting the PT explanation was found starting in the year 2000 when geologists began digging through five volcanic ash beds discovered in Meishan, China.

The ash beds continue to provide scientists with evidence to explore the carbon cycles captured in ancient rock formations and lava flows buried deep inside the earth’s crust. Archeologists find concentrations of iridium inside the ancient layers of ash during digs that are relatively new at the China location. Iridium is an element rare to the Earth’s surface but contained in high amounts in comets, meteors, and old volcano eruptions.

Pangaea: Gigantic land mass
before the continents separated

The rare element’s concentration inside the newly found excavated sites dates to the PT period, giving credibility to the often disputed theory that the large extinction did happen.

Evidence from lifeforms that existed at the time of the PT disappeared long ago. Scientists think small animal life forms, even some mammals, existed. But that’s speculation and is nothing more than guessing.   

In theory, the PT event resulted from severe damages to the Earth’s atmosphere from the eruption of hundreds of volcanoes as well as numerous comet and meteor impacts on the Earth. The atmosphere became so polluted that sunshine was blocked from hitting the earth, causing continuous darkness for hundreds of thousands of years.

Oxygen levels in the air slowly depleted, stopping the biological life cycle of plants; the food chain stopped, and animals died off.      

Scientists describe the PT as an event. In scientific terms, the time required for the climate changes to cause The Great Dying could cover a million years or more. Most people can’t relate to the meaning of such a long time as it’s described by experts of geology. An event for most people is a relatively short period of time for a particular occurrence, not a time period that could be more than one million years.     

The ravages to the air and environment increased because Earth’s land mass consisted of a single supercontinent during the Permian era. Called Pangaea, that huge land mass included all the ground areas we identify today as Earth’s seven continents. Pangaea didn’t start to break up until half way into the Triassic period (when dinosaurs flourished) about 175 million years ago.

The size of the single continent contributed to the massive extinction by disrupting the circulation of seawater, making oceans stagnant. This caused a depletion of oxygen in seawater. Sea creatures died, eliminating about 96% of the ocean life.    

Digging in volcano layers
in Meishan, China

Peter Ward, a geologist respected for his work in studying fossils, has studied rock layers from the Permian and Triassic periods. His findings show an abundance of animal fossils in the time up to the end of the Permian period. But throughout the first half of the Triassic period, Ward found very few fossils. He concludes that the lack of recorded life between the two periods proves that The Great Dying occurred about that time 252 million years ago. It was the most catastrophic extinction that killed off Earth’s reptiles, amphibians, insects and plants, according to Ward.

Evidence about The Great Dying remains meager and makes most of the reports about that period strictly speculation. Before the geological findings in China, the idea of the world’s biggest extinction was not accepted as a scientific fact. More discoveries will undoubtedly surface from the China digs and from the hands-on research from determined geologists such as Ward. 

Physical discoveries as basic as skeletons and thousands of fossils have given geologists accurate evidence about the years dinosaurs dominated the earth. Studying chemical residue among Earth’s layers is the only way scientists can find evidence about The Great Dying. The physical evidence disappeared during the more than 200 million years since that cataclysmic event of Earth’s history happened.

Clocks Set to Noon When Time Zones Began

It’s called “The Day of Two Noons.” On November 18, 1883, the four time zones across the United States officially began when clocks were reset to precisely 12:00 noon.

Time zones and Standard Time came out of the necessity of railroads to stay on schedule. Train travel kept improving, shrinking the time between cities, and requiring precise arrival and departure times.

Several competing railroad lines crisscrossed the United States. It was a fast-growing industry that moved people and freight each day over thousands of miles of rail lines that covered North America by the 1880s.

Each community the railroads serviced used their own local times within the same state and often between towns that were only a few miles of each other. The complicated time schedules of each railroad line confused travelers. The different railroad companies worked together to end the confusion of dealing with thousands of different times. The competing railroads collaborated to create what became known as Standard Time across the nation.

The railroads looked to the British Empire’s use of Standard Time as an example of how to make the time zone system work. Great Britain was years ahead of America in making time schedules uniform. British railroads were using a standard time system 36 years before American railroads took the lead in 1883.

American railroads established four time zones that crossed the United States one hour apart from each other with the eastern states beginning each day four hours earlier than the western states. Following the movement of the sun, the four zones each covered approximately 25 percent of the country. The railroads named them the Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones.

American railroads coordinated the extremely complicated time changes on that November day in 1883 when all railroad clocks and many thousand city clocks began Standard Time for their particular zones. 

On November 18th, each clock in the Eastern Time Zone was reset to 12:00 noon when the sun was at its highest position in the sky, making that the second time the clock showed noon. Precisely 60 minutes later, clocks in the Central Time Zone were reset at noon. Clocks in the Mountain Time Zone were next, and “The Day of Two Noons” completed its four-hour trek across the continental U.S. in the Pacific Time Zone when clocks there moved to noon.

Within a year, 85% of all U.S. cities with populations of more than 10,000 (approximately 200 cities) used what became known as Standard Time. But paving the way and shouldering the expenses of starting four time zones remained with the commercial railroads for more than 34 and a half years.

The U.S. government finally took over the responsibility of administrating the time zones with the Interstate Commerce Commission when the U.S. Congress made the Standard Time Act a law on March 19, 1918. 

The country’s railroads regulated themselves for more than 34 years concerning the use and revenue requirements of the continental time zones. That would be unheard of in today’s society. The necessity of time zones keeping an accurate measurement of time as the sun passes across our continent extends to all activities in our society.