On a chilly October evening in 1958, a group of MIT students shuffled onto the Harvard Bridge, which separates the university town of Cambridge from Boston proper. The shortest among them lay down on the sidewalk at the bridge's start, his friends marked his length, he got up, moved forward, and repeated the process.

The steel haunched girder bridge connecting Back Bay with Cambridge, Massachusetts – known locally as the birthplace of the unit of measurement known as the "Smoot," – defined as the length from head to toe of one Oliver Smoot.

The man in question was Oliver Smoot, then a freshman at the institution who was pledging to join the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. As part of his initiation, he was tasked with measuring the Harvard Bridge using his own height. The resulting unit, the "smoot," remains visible on the bridge today, with its markings repainted annually.

Local police even use these markings to pinpoint locations of traffic incidents. Google Earth also includes it as a unit, measuring five feet seven inches (170.18 cm) - you can find it as the last item under "Settings," then "Distance units."

Smoot went on to a career in standards and policy within the technology sector. After holding various roles, he served as chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) from 2001 to 2002 and later as president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) from 2003 to 2005.

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