Revealed after 50 years: The secret of the greatest-ever student prank | Hacker News Reader

Revealed after 50 years: The secret of the greatest-ever student prank

dailymail.co.uk

60 pointsnickb13 comments

My father is one of the two pranksters named in the article. The diagram of how to get the car up and over the edge of the roof was the big secret and closely resembles the sketches he showed me as a child. The article doesn't say that they had to get the car up in 20 minutes because of the regular beat of the local policeman.

My family were all sworn to secrecy as they had agreed to keep the mystery up - I went to the same college and had to play dumb, even though the authorities had a good idea of who had done it.

We revisited the college recently and sneaked up the tower to go over some of the more obscure details.

I have actually played a couple of fairly major jokes in my time, but this page isn't the place to talk about them.

I heard that once some pranksters got sent down for soap-bombing the fountain in the engineering department, just after their finals. Hence 4 years work and no degree. The wrath of the university can be more scary that the police in many ways.

The picture at the bottom of the story makes it worth a look all on its own, perfectly capturing the truth behind why many of us hack/build/design/create...for that post-release thrill of having a woman gaze curiously and perhaps even admiringly at what we've just made. The guy's face says it all. I know I've been there many a time.

http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/misc/best_of.html

Some of the MIT hacks are nearly as impressive, though the MIT kids have the advantage of modern technology. One that stands out was a police car on top of their main dome, complete with coffee and a donut box containing instructions for taking the police car down.

That's fantastic, but I'm afraid this is not the greatest prank ever. Which one is? This one:

http://today.caltech.edu/today/story-display.tcl?story_id=11...

Why is it that almost all of these pranks have happened 10 or more years ago?

Because if you tried it today you would be arrested for terrorism.

Well said. Let's not forget this from the last year: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare

This one was good too - bomb squad called in over cardboard boxes painted like Mario ? blocks.

http://www.bladediary.com/questionblocks/index.html

Don't make excuses. The 1950s was a very conformist era, maybe they would have been arrested for being communists.

And they didn't even have Home Depot, Kinko's, GPS or Arduinos. There are people who practically make a career out of such pranks, sometimes much less benign -- Billboard Liberation Front, for example.

http://www.billboardliberation.com/2008/02/28/video-of-the-a...

Genius.

That bottle of champagne was awesome too!

The then Dean of Caius, the late Rev Hugh Montefiore, had an inkling who was responsible and sent a congratulatory case of champagne to their staircase, while maintaining in public he knew nothing of the culprits.

that's definitely the best part! good to know that some people can take a joke

nowadays the pranksters would have been arrested and sent to jail. back then people had more common sense. now the authorities are a bunch of low-IQ idiots and we're all subject to their twisted view of reality.

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