It was a cool April 4 morning over the Charles River, the kind of New England spring light that makes Boston appear clean. A small group of people had gathered around a wooden cart on the Longfellow Bridge. On top of it was a chaise lounge pillow. Martin Klein, an 85-year-old man, was lying on the pillow and leaning against the wind. He resembled a gentleman being transported across a Venetian canal, but this time it was Cambridge, and the ferry was a hand-pulled engineering feat. It’s difficult to ignore how absurdity feels rigorous at MIT, of all places.
The hack itself adheres to a custom that predates the majority of the involved students. Oliver Smoot, a fraternity pledge, laid down hundreds of times across the Harvard Bridge in 1958 so that his Lambda Chi Alpha brothers could paint a new unit of measurement on the concrete. With one ear, the bridge measured 364.4 smoots. These markings are still repainted nearly seven decades later. They are accepted by the city. They are used by the police to report incidents. Walking that span today gives you the impression that you’re passing through one of the few practical jokes that the world has quietly decided to preserve.
The same impulse was redirected on April 4. The Longfellow Bridge was measured by the team in “kleins,” which were named for Dr. Martin Klein, Smoot’s classmate from the MIT Class of 1962. For the record, a klein is 4 feet 9.5 inches, which translates to 0.85820896 smoots—a figure so blatantly illogical that it could only have come from math enthusiasts. The trip celebrated Klein’s 85th birthday as well as Smoot’s original hack. It’s the kind of double-tribute that MIT seems to specialize in: equal parts affection, engineering, and a refusal to take itself too seriously.
It’s important to note that Klein is more than just a moniker for a prank. The Titanic, the Lusitania, and the Nuestra Señora de Atocha were all located using his technology, which is widely regarded as the father of commercial side-scan sonar. He is a Life Fellow of the Explorers Club and a member of the MIT Sea Grant Advisory Board. Therefore, it wasn’t just a joke when the team decided to survey the bridge using a “side-scan” method, in which Klein himself reclined on the cart and turned his head to either side as the official observation device. Delivered in the only dialect MIT truly speaks fluently, it was a sort of love letter.
Makenna Reilly, a second-year mechanical engineering undergraduate, and Andrew Bennett, a senior lecturer in MechE who has been at MIT long enough to recall the kinds of weekends that gave rise to these stories in the first place, led the expedition. They were accompanied by more than a dozen surveyors from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Harvard Extension School, the Edgerton Center, the Museum’s Hart Nautical Collections, and MIT Sea Grant. A duck boat going under the span, a mermaid tail, a kayak paddle, a sleeping goose, and what the team described with characteristic dryness as a tenacious survey team were among the anomalies that were observed during the survey.
The count was completed by the end of the morning. Two legs and 442 kleins. A little ceremony took place after someone wrote “Shortfellow Bridge – 442 Kleins + pair of legs” in blue chalk on the sidewalk. Now that I’ve seen the footage, there’s a tender quality to it all. In the city where he became himself, a man who devoted his professional life to recovering items lost to deep water was gradually dragged across a bridge. It’s really unclear if the kleins will endure as long as the smoots. Paint is more durable than chalk. Perhaps that’s part of the point, though. Certain hacks are designed to last. Others are only intended to have some significance for the individuals present, once, on a sunny April morning.
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