AS A prank in 1958, Matthew Dirckx tells us, a group of students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology used the body of Oliver Smoot, the shortest new recruit to their fraternity, to measure the length of a bridge across the Charles river connecting Boston to the MIT campus. The bridge was found to be 364.4 smoots long, plus or minus an ear.
The smoot markings are repainted each year by the fraternity and the story has become a well-loved piece of MIT folklore. When the bridge was reconstructed in 1989, the concrete pavements were scored at 1-smoot increments instead of the normal 6 feet.
As befits someone who is a unit of measurement, Smoot went on to a distinguished career in the American National Standards Institute and the International Organization for Standardization. He returns to MIT on 4 October for a 50th anniversary celebration, which will ...
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