I can't believe it - I'm sure that somebody must have been messing with Wikipedia.

Sorry - lemme 'splain. No - is too much. Lemme sum up.

Some years ago, I spent a good bit of time in Boston for work. I used to love to run up and down the Charles River.

There is a bridge across the Charles that's called the Harvard Bridge (although it actually goes to MIT) -

           

In Boston, everybody runs along the Charles, and everybody runs across the Harvard Bridge (also known as the Mass Avenue bridge).

When you're running across it, you'll see markers about every fifty feet or so saying "50 Smoots", "60 Smoots" and so on.

If you're curious, you'll ask, and anybody can tell you - a bunch of MIT students back around 1960 took one of their number, Oliver Smoot, and layed him out end to end, using his body as a ruler to measure the Harvard Bridge. Smoot was 5''7" tall - so that unit of measure is 1 Smoot. The bridge was found to be 364.4 Smoots (plus or minus one ear) long. (for those of you who can't stand it - that's 2146 feet 2.8 inches long, not counting the ear).

Now, that's a great story, and - as far as I know - a true story.

But here's where stuff gets weird; my friend Ian has been running in Boston lately, and posted on Facebook about it, and of course discussion of Oliver Smoot came up. I was wondering what happened to him later in life - did he cure a disease? Build a dam? Run the Marine Corps Marathon in 3:08:10 (negative splits) and qualify for Boston?

And so my friend Annie posted the link to the Wikipedia article about him - which I am certain must have been tampered with. A blatant example of Wikipedia vandalism (although an entertaining one : )

Why do I say that somebody's been playing with WIkipedia? Because of this - this guy Oliver Smoot, who was used by his fellow MIT students as a unit of measure, later went on (according to this article  in Wikipedia) to become the president of ISO - the International Standards Organization - and the chairman of ANSI - the American National Standards Institute : )

...of course, it's possible that the article is, indeed, factual - I'm not yet willing to Google my way around to find out, as it's just too perfect as it stands. The possibility that it might be accurate is just too much fun to play with : )


UPDATE: well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit - it's actually true. The ANSI site talks about him, mentions the ISO position, and even mentions the irony that their chairman was once used as a standard unit of measure.