Sellar Bell age 78, was called home on . Home-Going Celebration 11AM Friday, in the Chapel of SMOOT FUNERAL SERVICES, 4019 E Livingston Ave., Columbus, Ohio. Family will ...
LEWIS R. SMOOT, SR. departed this life, peacefully, on Saturday, , at the age of 90. Lewis was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, , to the union of the late ...
Oliver R. Smoot was selected by his Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity pledgemaster because he was deemed shortest—which made measuring the bridge the most labor-intensive—and he was the "most scientifically named."
Now retired and living in San Diego, Smoot took the time to talk to The Register about the prank that made him a unit of measurement and the lasting impact of standards. Looking back, he recalled how fraternity leaders assigned him the task, and he and his friends carried it out the next day.
After consultation with MIT administration, and Smoot himself, the Institute formed the Smoot Measurement and Length Recalibration (SMaLR) Task Force earlier this year. The smoot was created in October 1958 after seven MIT students calibrated the Mass. Ave. bridge using 5’7 Oliver Smoot '62.
A smoot is a nonstandard unit of length that originated at MIT in the 1950s. The year was 1958, and Oliver R. Smoot was pledging to the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity.
Smoot, a physicist at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting minute temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background, a prediction of the Big Bang theory.
This chart provides a summary of Smoot conversions to different Length units.