This really needs to be viewed as the fraternity prank that it was. However, it has also become a tradition. The local road authority gave up and allows them to repaint the Smoot markers. However, Smoot went on to head both ANSI and ISO in his career. I doubt he is a defender of Customary. I graduated from MIT a few years after Smoot. All of my courses were taught exclusively in SI, called rationalized mksa at the time. When a rare Customary units homework problem was thrown in the mix, the expected solution (required for full credit) was to convert to metric, solve, convert the answer back to Customary if the problem demanded.
--- On Sat, 3/28/09, John Frewen-Lord <j...@frewston.plus.com> wrote: From: John Frewen-Lord <j...@frewston.plus.com> Subject: [USMA:44142] smoots To: "U.S. Metric Association" <usma@colostate.edu> Date: Saturday, March 28, 2009, 5:33 AM Jerry talked about US isolationism in terms of measurements. Not only the US as a whole - how about this one (tongue in cheek) from Boston, MA: "Smoots" on the Harvard Bridge MIT students are world-famous for their brains and creativity, and the invention of the "Smoot" as unit of measure is no exception. In 1958, the pledge class of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity marked the length of the Harvard Bridge (which goes to MIT) using pledge Oliver Smoot as a measuring tool. For the record, Smoot was 5 feet 7 inches tall, and the bridge is 364.4 Smoots (plus an ear) long. The bridge is marked with colored lines to mark every 10 Smoots, and the markers are painted on the sidewalk on the outbound side of the bridge. Location: Over the Charles River between Back Bay and Cambridge
