You’ve heard of feet and meters… but have you ever heard of the Smoot?
Back in 1958, Oliver Smoot began attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was also pledging for the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. At 5′ 7″, Smoot was the shortest pledge by far, so his future frat brothers came up with a personalized initiation for him: they took him to the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge and used his body to measure the length of the bridge, with an exhausted Smoot standing up and lying down every time the frat members marked off another “Smoot”. The bridge was eventually found to be 364.4 Smoots long.
The prank became something of a local legend in the Boston area. In the years following the prank, whenever the city of Boston painted over the “Smoot Markers”, the fraternity members would surreptitiously sneak back onto the bridge and paint them back. After a few years of back and forth between the city and the fraternity, the city of Boston eventually gave up and announced that they would no longer paint over the markers. In the past few years, the city has even warmed up to the markers by providing an off-duty motorcycle officer to warn traffic as the fraternity members repaint the markers. I believe that the city even uses “Smoots” as their official measurement of the bridge!
Over the years, Smoots have taken off as something of a “geek joke”. You can even convert between feet and Smoots with Google calculator: open a Google window and type “8.5 feet in Smoots” into the search box. On the next page, Google will have your answer (1.52238806 Smoots).
Smoot eventually became chairman of the American National Standards Institute, was in the news lately because of Smoot Celebration Day at MIT, where he received a plaque which will be installed on the bridge later this year.