The smoot isn’t moot

By The Daily Progress

Published: October 10, 2008

Tom Cruise is one smoot.

That means that the actor is 5 feet, 7 inches tall.

Fifty years ago, the smoot measurement was invented by a fraternity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Oliver Smoot was the shortest pledge in Lambda Chi Alpha in 1958 when the fraternity brothers decided to use him as a yardstick. They took him out to the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge in Cam-bridge, laid him end-to-end across the bridge (some versions of the story have him getting up and lying down hundreds of times; others say the frat boys “rolled” him heels over head) and determined that the structure is 364.4 smoots long.

Last Saturday, the original Smoot was back at MIT for Smoot Celebration Day. He was awarded a plaque, which later will be attached to the bridge.

By the way, Oliver had a cousin, George Smoot, who also attended MIT. Both men also went on to earn accomplishments, one way or another, in the field of measurements.

One Smoot became president of the American National Standards Institute.

The other won a Nobel Prize for his share of research into measurement of the “… black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation” — whatever that means.

By the way, what do Pamela Ander-son, John McCain, Mariah Carey and Jon Stewart have in common?

Each of them is one smoot tall.