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MIT: Students by Day, Hackers by Night

A newly revised book celebrates MIT's illustrious tradition of hacks and pranks

01 Jul 2011

MIT historian T.F. Peterson, author of Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT (MIT Press, 2011), notes that hacking teaches students “to work productively in teams, to solve engineering problems, and to communicate to the larger world.” The best hacks are also, in their elegance, delightful to contemplate. With MIT Press’s kind permission, we present a sampling from Nightwork.
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Photo: Bob Brooks

During the 1982 Harvard–Yale football game, a black weather balloon 2 meters in diameter, with “MIT” in large white letters, emerged from midfield and exploded, showering the field in talcum powder. It was only the most spectacular of three pranks that day; none of the groups knew the others had targeted the same event.
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Photo: Bob Brooks

In the middle of the second quarter, the balloon emerged from under the field.
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Photo: Bob Brooks

It grew...
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Photo: Bob Brooks

...and grew...
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Photo: Bob Brooks

until it exploded.
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Photo: J. Alan Ritter

Sometimes engineering analysis needs homegrown dimensions. The smoot, used to measure the length of the 364.4-smoot-long Harvard Bridge, was based on the height of student Oliver Smoot. The bruno, Nightwork notes, is a volume “equal to the size of the dent in the asphalt resulting from the six-story free fall of an upright piano.”
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Photo: MIT Museum General Collections

In this 1926 Ford automobile hack, is the driver the same James Killian who was a member of the class of 1926, MIT president from 1949 to 1959, and namesake of campus landmark Killian Court? Apparently so.
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Photo: Eric Schmiedl

It may not take much imagination to see the three round windows of MIT’s Building E25 as a traffic light, but only engineering students would label them “Hack,” “Punt” (“to skip certain work because of competing demands,” Nightwork helpfully explains), and “Tool” (a person who grinds away at work).
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Photo: Eric Schmiedl

Among the many objects to grace the roof of MIT’s Great Dome, a.k.a. Building 10, are a replica of the Apollo 11 moon landing, an actual campus police car, a working telephone booth, and [pictured] a pair of solar-powered subway “cars” that used the dome itself as a track to shuttle back and forth.
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Photo: Terri Iuzzolino Matsakis

The Great Dome has also been dressed up variously as Kilroy (1972), the Great Pumpkin (1962 and 1994), a beanie cap (1996), a giant breast, complete with nipple (1979), and the Star Wars character R2D2 [pictured].
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Photo: Eric Schmiedl

Other buildings have seen their share of hacks. Here, the Student Center sports the Dark Mark of Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters, on the occasion of the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the beloved series.
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Photo: Erik Nygren

At a 2003 Robot Rights Protest, human protestors plied passersby with handouts that declared “Contemporary slavery takes various forms and affects bots of all ages, sex, operating systems, and machining.” Meanwhile, the robot protestors, such as this one, came armed with signs of their own.
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Photo: Terri Iuzzolino Matsakis

Protest is a way of life at MIT. When Bill Gates visited the campus in 1996, a number of buildings sported enormous banners decrying his company’s products.
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Photo: Terri Iuzzolino Matsakis

Is hacking a sacred activity at MIT? Consider a mural painted on one of the central pillars at the east end of Cathedral 7, in which an HP28S calculator is the main object of adoration. Its label, “Hackito ergo sum” (based on philosopher René Descartes’s famous “Cogito, ergo sum”) can be roughly translated as “I hack, therefore I am.”
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type:slideshow education james killian innovation hacking hackers mit measurement hands on

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