Smoots
There have been many systems of ways to measure things over the years. When I was growing up in
England the currency consisted of four farthings to the penny, twelve pennies to the shilling and twenty
shillings to the pound. The crown had largely disappeared but the half crown was still a staple of commerce.
The metric system became mandatory in medicine in 1964 and then in 1970 the currency was converted to
100 pence to the pound and lumber came by the meter. Then I came to this country where the currency was
metric but lumber came as 2 by 4s, Tylenol was prescribed in grains and IVs were measured in drops. You
cannot even look up the definition of the size of a drop. Fortunately medicine is now fully metric.
When we bought land in Hampden, the deed dated back to about 1815 and was measured in rods
(16.5 feet, 5.03 meters). A rod was originally the distance from the ploughman to the nose of the lead ox. The
ploughman needed a rod to encourage the oxen and this was the length of the average staff. Rods are the
same as poles and perches which are part of an antique system that also has the hundredweight (112 pounds),
furlongs (220 yards) and other terms you will probably only see in historical novels. These were actual real
units, but a vast array of speculative units has been developed often by physicists who apparently like to make
jokes of numbers. For instance, a parsec (3.26 light years or 2 x 1016 meters which has a seriously large number
of zeros) is a unit used by astronomers to measure enormous distances. Some bright spark then described the
attoparsec. The prefix “atto” indicates 10-18 which is one quintillionth, or a very, very tiny proportion, which
when combined with a parsec, which is a very large number, works out to be – an inch!
Then there are the plain weird and mostly fictional units of measurement. The beard-second was
inspired by the light-year and was devised by a physics professor to describe a very short distance. The beardsecond is the length that an average beard grows in one second and turns out to be exactly 100 angstroms or
10 nanometers (10-9 or one billionth of a meter). Douglas Adams, author of “The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the
Galaxy” developed the sheppey which he defined as the closest distance at which a sheep remains picturesque
and is about 7/8 of a mile or 1.4 kilometers. Finally, before I get to the title of this piece, there is the milliHelen.
Since Helen of Troy is widely known as the face that launched a thousand ships, the milliHelen, or millih, is the
amount of beauty required to launch one ship. This may have been first suggested by Isaac Asimov, but actual
quantification remains elusive, mostly because, as we all know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. David
Goines tried to link the unit to the ability of beauty to light a fire and defined the picoHelen (10-12h) as just
enough to barbecue a couple of steaks. In the meantime the unit remains a work in progress.
So what about Smoots? You may not realize it but we are really fortunate that this unit, which is a local
legend, never really caught on. In 1958 Oliver Smoot was one of a group of first year students at MIT who were
trying to join a fraternity. Their assignment was to measure the Harvard Bridge which spans the Charles River
using one of the group. Since Smoot was the shortest he was designated as the unit and they calibrated the
bridge by having him lie down sequentially across the bridge and marking the intervals, which became known
as “smoots.” The police must have been in a whimsical mood because the graffiti were not erased and have
been renewed each year ever since. When the bridge was renovated in 1987 the authorities were persuaded
to continue the tradition and the bridge was reconstructed with five foot seven inch pavers instead of the
usual six footers. Oliver Smoot is currently the President of the International Organization of Standardization.
Had smoots become more widespread we would be buying 2 by 4s as .03 by.06s and I would be 1.09s
tall. Isn’t it time that America joined the rest of the world and used the metric system. Admittedly 2 by 4s
would be 6 by 12s (centimeters that is) but that’s not so bad. Of course, if you think about it, smoots lumber
could be called 3 by 6s. We really should dump Farenheit, a system where 20o is below freezing and boiling is
212o compared to Celsius where freezing is 0o and boiling is a sensible 100o. So simple, but it will never happen.
One IgNobel this month: the study that described “How to procrastinate and still get things done.”
Stay warm.
Nick Coe