{"id":1916,"date":"2009-08-20T15:36:23","date_gmt":"2009-08-20T20:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/?p=1916"},"modified":"2021-12-18T10:38:06","modified_gmt":"2021-12-18T15:38:06","slug":"smoot-potrzebie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/smoot-potrzebie\/","title":{"rendered":"Smoots and Potrzebies (Units of Distance)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Recently I expressed my fascination<\/a> with the “I\u2019m Feeling Geeky” option on Google Map\u2019s Great Circle distance calculator. It calculated the distance between Juneau, Alaska and the Canadian border easily enough in about fifty different units of measurement, only two of which were remotely useful, kilometers and miles. However, cubits and leagues, chains and double-paces, rods and furlongs, even American football fields and Olympic swimming pools, were all available for display.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But so were Smoot and Potrzebie. I had at least a passing knowledge of the preponderance of other measures but these two confounded me. Should I have known logically that 1 Smoot equaled 67 Inches<\/a> or that 1 Potrzebie equaled 2.2633 Millimeters<\/a>, and thus 1 Smoot equaled 751.910927 Potrzebies?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did I nod off one day in class back in Middle School when the teacher discussed these measures, resulting in an embarrassing gap of knowledge decades later? Obviously there must have been some legitimacy to them or Google wouldn\u2019t have included them in their calculator. Right? Thank goodness for Wikipedia. The answer is affirmative in a parallel universe where “legitimacy” and “geeky” mean the same thing. However, these measures become totally superfluous on Planet Reality. What a shame. The world could use more whimsy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Smoot<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Smoot owes its name and standard of measurement to one Oliver R. Smoot, a 1958 student and fraternity pledge at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology<\/a>. His fraternity brothers defined a Smoot to equal his five-foot-seven-inch frame, or 1.7018 meters. Using the human body as a measuring device isn\u2019t that farfetched, and in fact has been rather common throughout history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The students proceeded to take their newly coined unit of measure, literally in the flesh, to the Harvard Bridge at the southern edge of MIT (map<\/a>). Here they measured the span across the Charles River between Cambridge and Boston at 364.4 Smoots, plus or minus one ear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Smoots<\/a>
364.4 Smoots \u00b1 1 Ear<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The tradition lives on more than fifty years later. The Harvard Bridge still contains painted markers in ten smoot increments. Authorities not only tolerate this extraneous grafitti, but accept it. Students periodically refresh and repaint the markers to keep them visible. I took a photograph of the final marker<\/a> on a recent visit, which I posted above..<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is it about university students and bridges, though? I\u2019m aware of a different defacement in another college town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n