Years of pranks on display at Hall of Hacks

2001-02-05 12:50

Cambridge, Massachusetts - The Hall of Hacks is likely the only place in the world that pays homage to the smoot.

The "smoot," as virtually any Massachusetts Institute of Technology student can explain, is a unit of measurement named after fraternity pledge Oliver Smoot Jr, class of 1962, who was used as a human ruler to measure the Harvard Bridge over the Charles River.

The bridge is precisely 364.4 smoots long.

The Hall of Hacks, a permanent exhibit in the MIT Museum, pays tribute to practical jokes, or "hacks," that have a long and storied history at the school.

It's "like going into a museum. You view a hack the way you might view a new painting or sculpture," says Samuel Jay Keyser, an emeritus member of MIT's Linguistics and Philosophy department and a hacking aficionado. "It's not a cause for uproar, unless you slice up a cat or something. The best ones are elegant and clever."

The hall is home to Ferdi, a large fibreglass cow with a mortarboard on its head. Ferdi was stolen from the lawn in front of the Hilltop Steakhouse in Saugus and placed atop MIT's Great Dome in 1981.

Leonard DeRosa, a restaurant official, says the owner was initially upset about the theft. "But then we got so much publicity about it.

We got inundated with people who came to see the place where it was missing," DeRosa says. "I've been here 24 years, and it still comes up often."

The first hack was documented in the memoirs of John Ripley Freeman, class of 1876, who wrote that he observed iodide of nitrogen sprinkled on the floor of a military drill room just before it exploded prior to the start of an assembly.

The appeal of hacking is all in the difficulty of execution, says Michael Heaney, class of 1981, who joined a dozen other students in the steakhouse cow hack and also helped put a giant jock strap on the school's athletic centre.

"It's all about doing things that no one has done before, going where no one else has gone," says Heaney, now a physicist in Palo Alto, California. "It's like a mountain that you've got to climb."

Decades of hackers have observed a strict code of honour: Truly noteworthy hacks require difficulty in execution, anonymity of hackers and preservation of school property.

The pranks are removed by a special group from the university's Safety Office, the Confined Space Rescue Team. It's headed by David Barber, who says the team has removed such objects as a Christmas tree and gargoyles from the lobby ceiling of a classroom building and a piano and an enormous beanie hat perched on the Great Dome.

The hall's centrepiece is the shell of a full-size police car complete with flashing lights, a dummy cop in the driver's seat, and doughnut remnants. It was put on top of the Great Dome in 1994.

Unlike the fibreglass cow, which was easily removed, school officials needed a crane to remove the car from the 150-foot-high (45-metre-high) Dome.

"I think that was everyone's favourite," Keyser says. "It was so unexpected, and it was very hard to do."

Some of the hall's displays are innocuous looking in the extreme. In one corner stands an overturned trash can. Resting atop it is a lunch tray holding a single place setting minus a knife.

In 1985, hackers managed to get these goods installed in a legitimate exhibition of contemporary art at the List Gallery on campus.

A gallery label read, in part, "The sterile lateralism of the grouped utensils (sans knife) conveys a sense of eternal ennui, framed within the subtle ambience of discrete putrefaction." No critic of the exhibit ever realised that "No Knife" was a hack.

Although hacks are usually committed by students, rumours abound that faculty and school employees have also participated. The school usually looks the other way when it comes to hacks, but Keyser says faculty participation is, at most, a rarity.

Keyser recalls once announcing that he wanted to do a hack - to his former boss, then-provost John Deutsch, later head of the CIA and now back at MIT as a chemistry professor.

"He said, 'If you do, you're fired'." - Sapa-AP

- AP