Few things matter more in engineering than measurement. A 20-metre bridge over a 30-metre canyon has obvious drawbacks. And the peak of measurement recognition may be to have a unit named after you. To achieve this you generally need two things: to have been a scientific giant in your era, and be dead.
That is unless you’re Oliver Reed Smoot. When Smoot became a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he had no idea he was going to, quite literally, become a unit of measurement. As a junior member, or ‘Pledge’, of the Lambda Zeta (MIT) chapter of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity, he knew he would have to do his pledgemaster’s bidding and, as it happened, his pledgemaster had an interesting job for him.
The fraternity were minded to measure the distance across the Harvard Bridge that links Boston to Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the Charles River. Now you might be forgiven for thinking that this distance was already well known – after all...