How Do You Measure A Bridge?

Carefully...
Smoot by Smoot.

In 1958, pledges at MIT's Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity were ordered to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge between Boston's Back Bay and the school's campus on the Cambridge side of the Charles River... using the shortest pledge, 5'7" Oliver R. Smoot, Jr. as the unit of measure. Two hours and one interruption by police later, the pledges had painted markings at 10 smoot intervals and determined the eastern pedestrian walkway's length was 364.4 smoots ± one ear.

To this day, the pledges repaint the markings twice a year without objection from the police, who use the smoot markings as a reference point in traffic accident reports. When the bridge was repaired in the 1980's Continental Construction Company of Cambridge also agreed to make the new concrete sidewalk slabs 5' 7" long to coincide with the smoots, instead of the usual 6' increments, and the equivalent markings were painted on the bridge's other walkway without dragging and dropping the then middle aged Smoot once again.

"Ollie" graduated MIT in 1962, and then got a law degree at Georgetown. He made a presentation to the House Science Committee's Subcommittee on Technology on March 20, 2000, entitled “The Role of Technical Standards in Today's Society and in the Future". He was Chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) from 2001 to 2002 and President of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) from 2003 to 2004.

He returned to MIT on October 4, 2008 for a 50th anniversary celebration, including the installation of a plaque on the bridge, at which time Oliver R. Smoot, Jr. was also presented with an official unit of measurement: a 5'7" smoot stick.