Bridge Length Measurement
The Harvard Bridge is measured, locally, in smoots.
In 1958, members of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity at MIT measured the bridge's eastern sidewalk by carrying or dragging the shortest pledge that year, Oliver Smoot (who later became president of the International Organization for Standardization), end over end.
Crossing pedestrians are informed by length markers painted at 10-smoot intervals that the bridge is 364.4 smoots long, "plus one ear". The qualifier "plus or minus" was originally intended to express measurement uncertainty, but over the years the words "or minus" have gone missing in many citations, including the markings on the bridge itself. The marks are repainted twice each year by members of the fraternity.
During the reconstruction in the 1980s, the smoot markings were repainted on the new deck, and the sidewalks were divided into smoot-length slabs rather than the standard six feet. The Cambridge police use the smoot marks as a coordinate system when reporting accidents on the bridge.
Read more about this topic: Harvard Bridge
Famous quotes containing the words bridge, length and/or measurement:
“I was at work that morning. Someone came riding like mad
Over the bridge and up the road—Farmer Rouf’s little lad.
Bareback he rode; he had no hat; he hardly stopped to say,
“Morgan’s men are coming, Frau, they’re galloping on this way.”
—Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894)
“To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain
physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much as and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined.”
—Percy W. Bridgman (1882–1961)
“That’s the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)