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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The father of a measurement known as the “Smoot” returned Saturday to be honored at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the school where he and his fraternity brothers invented it 50 years ago.
Oliver Smoot was the shortest pledge in the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity in 1958 when its members decided to lay him on the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge. After discovering Smoot measured 5 feet 7 inches tall, they marked the bridge in those increments, with an eventually exhausted Smoot getting up and down for each measurement. They determined the bridge was 364.4 Smoots long.
