Photo of Peter Miller, Oliver Smoot (MIT '62) and Gordon Mann on the Harvard Bridge measuring Smoots. Smoot is lying down. The event took place in 1958 when Smoot was pledging to fraternity Lambda Chi Alpha, and Smoot himself was used by his fraternity brothers as an instrument to measure the bridge. The length of the bridge was determined to be 364.4 Smoots plus one ear. A Smoot has since entered the language as a unit of (tongue in cheek) measurement.