The Measure of a Smoot

by Ken Winston

According to an ancient saying, man is the measure of all things.  Today we would modify that statement to eliminate the gendered language.  But we would also recognize that it is often apt when used in the singular.

For example, on Google Earth maps, you can measure the distance between two points using a variety of different measures, which are listed in a menu at the top.  On this list, just under “nautical miles,” is “smoots”.  As in: “How long is that flower bed?  It’s three smoots.”

How long is that?  Let’s consider.

Oliver Reed Smoot was born in 1940 and matriculated at MIT in the fall of 1958.  He was eager to join a fraternity, Lambda Chi Alpha, which had a house just across the river.  During pledge week, the Frats decided to submit the pledges to the mildly humiliating exercise of measuring the length of the MIT/Mass. Ave. bridge.  Of the 14 pledges, Smoot was the shortest and had what they regarded as the silliest name, so the frats decided to measure the bridge in Smoot lengths.

This involved getting Smoot to lie down at one end of the bridge, having the other pledges mark the point where his head was, then picking him up and laying him down again (feet to head), marking the new point each time with chalk, and so on across the bridge.  Painted numbers along the way marked each ten Smoots.  (You can still see the marks today.)

The frats claimed that the exercise was a suitable test of character, and thus a sign of worthiness to join the fraternity.  You can decide for yourself whether it was a true test, or just the common juvenile behavior of first-year college students.

The following fall, the big sophomores on campus decided to make the new pledges repaint the Smoot numbers.  With the indulgence of the Cambridge Police, and then the Massachusetts Metropolitan District Commission, every entering class at MIT since then has done the same.  (Does this mean that the MMDC encourages graffiti on public structures?  The agency says no.  In explanation: “Smoots aren’t just any kind of graffiti.  They’re smoots!”)

It turns out that the length of the bridge is 364.4 smoots plus one ear – allegedly to allow for a margin of error (and perhaps another bit of silliness).  In recent years, the Continental Construction Company of Cambridge has paved the bridge with slabs that are five feet seven inches long (the length of one smoot), instead of the usual six feet.

In 2005, Oliver Smoot was interviewed by National Public Radio for “All Things Considered” and was asked whether anything quite measures up [ouch!] to being the namesake of a unit of length.  Smoot replied: “I think I’ve done a lot of interesting things, but I can’t think of anything that took such a short time, was so totally unplanned, and has had such long-term consequences.”

There’s a lesson there, right?

Smoot in fact did a number of interesting things in his life with degrees from MIT and Georgetown Law School.  Most importantly, perhaps, he served as Chair of the American National Standards Institute from 2001 to 2002 and President of the International Organization for Standardization from 2003 to 2004.

October 4, 2008, was the 50th anniversary of the historic crossing on the MIT bridge, and the City of Cambridge declared it “Smoot Day.”  MIT students created a commemorative plaque and an aluminum Smoot Stick, which is deposited in the university’s museum.

In 2011, the American Heritage Dictionary included Smoot’s name as an entry in its fifth edition (with the name decapitalized: “smoot”), defining it as a unit of measure equal to 5 feet, 7 inches (1.70 meters).  And on May 7, 2016, Smoot served as the grand marshal of the parade marking the centenary of MIT’s move to Cambridge from the Back Bay.

Clearly, this is a man who serves as a measure of our lives.  The latest word we have is that he lives in San Diego with his wife Sandra Smoot.