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    The Smoot

    Fifty years ago this weekend, the 5'7" Oliver Smoot was used by his MIT fraternity brothers to mark the length of the Harvard Bridge between Boston and Cambridge, in what they called smoots.

    Brian Ries
    by Brian Ries

    Community Contributor

    The Harvard Bridge is officially 364.4 smoots long, plus or minus one ear. It smoot went on to become an internationally recognized yet non-standardized unit of measurement, and even appears as an option of measurement in Google Earth. Yay for Nerds!

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