Oliver Smoot was 5 feet 7 inches, and Lambda Chi Alpha had a use for that. The house sat on the Boston side of the Harvard Bridge. Campus was in Cambridge. Tom O’Connor, the pledgemaster, was tired of walking Massachusetts Avenue across the Charles with no idea how much bridge he had left. He picked Smoot because he was the shortest pledge, which meant more time on the pavement, and because the name already sounded like a unit, the way ampere and watt do. He told MIT Technology Review the story that way.
They took him out on a Thursday night in October 1958. Seven freshmen. The sensible plan was to lay him down a few times, chalk those lengths, and finish with a string. A sophomore from the house came by, thought it was funny, and stayed to watch. That ended the string. Smoot did the whole crossing, Boston to Cambridge. He later put it at about an hour and a half, and that is the figure he gives prospective students when he says you have no way of knowing what an hour and a half of work will turn into.
One sweater and a police van
What he actually remembers is the cold. One sweater. Gloves. Windbreakers on everybody. In the middle of the bridge the wind mattered more than the temperature. He said so to MIT in 2008.
He started by pushing himself up between marks. Then he could not do a push-up. His brothers carried him for a long stretch of what was left. A police van went past, made a U-turn, and came back toward them. False alarm. They got the last marks down.
Plus or minus an ear
The number they kept is 364.4 Smoots, plus or minus an ear. One Smoot is his height that night. Round it to 364 and you have sanded off the fraction they bothered to write down. The ear is the part they refused to fake. They knew the count was not exact, so they added plus or minus, and they wrote the e in ear as an epsilon, the error mark from a problem set. He has called that the cute part. Later versions dropped the epsilon. Plenty of them dropped the minus sign, too. Nobody measured the ear. In 2008 he said it was the same size it had been on the bridge.
Each length got a painted line. Every 10 Smoots got a number. Those are the Harvard Bridge Smoots, and they beat waving at the river if you are trying to say where something happened. When the bridge was rebuilt in the 1980s, Cambridge police asked to keep the paint. Officers were using the numbers in crash reports. MIT wrote that up in 1999. The contractor scored the new sidewalk every Smoot instead of every six feet.
The paint still wears off, and the house has kept going back, aside from a two-year gap during COVID. On a night with light rain in October 2023, Lambda Chi Alpha alumni were on the bridge with green, yellow, and purple paint, along with a few Alpha Phi students who had been pulled in by text. One of them was handed a green brush and the faded words Halfway to Hell. The older member told her to paint whichever letters she wanted.
Then he got the standards job for real
Smoot graduated in 1962, started law school at Georgetown, and got married in 1964. The sidewalk was not on his mind. A reporter from Holiday magazine, long gone now, called to ask about the strange paint the new pledges kept refreshing. That was the phone call that brought it back.
His actual job was standards. More than 30 years at the Information Technology Industry Council, a long run of that as executive vice president. He chaired the board of the American National Standards Institute. On January 1, 2003, he started a two-year term as president of the International Organization for Standardization. The group’s 2003 annual report mentions the law degree and the 25 years he had already spent on standards. He told Technology Review it certainly was not planned that way.
On June 4, 2009, the MIT Class of 1962 unveiled a plaque on the Cambridge end of the bridge. It says 364.4 Smoots, plus or minus one ear.