Hacking—The Formative Years

In honor of the April Fool's Day tradition of hoaxes, practical jokes, and various hijinks, we thought a look at the origins of "hacking" here at MIT might be in order.  What follows is a bit from Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT which looks at how it all started.

Armchair aficionados of the sport often assume that hacking was a twentieth-century phenomenon. But even before the Institute crossed the bridge from Boston to Cambridge in 1916, MIT students were hacking. John Ripley Freeman, renowned civil engineer and member of the class of 1875, noted in his memoirs that pranksters habitually sprinkled iodide of nitrogen, a mild contact explosive, on the drill room floor, adding considerable snap to routine assembly.

Of course, pranksters weren’t called hackers back then; only within the last thirty years has the term hack been synonymous with campus hijinks. But it was in those formative years of hacking at MIT — well before the term was coined — that the spirit and traditions of the sport were established.

Institute hacks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were primitive by today’s standards — jokes played on professors or pranks sparked by inter-class rivalries. Freshmen would steal the sophomore class flag before the annual football game. Sophomores would rearrange the furniture in freshmen dorm rooms while students were at class meetings. But in the 1920s, the Dorm Goblin, the first documented hacking group, raised the bar, setting the standard for subsequent generations of MIT hackers to follow or surpass.

In January 1928, the Dorm Goblin threaded a 35-foot telegraph pole through Senior House Dormitory and a few months later coaxed a live cow to the roof of the ’93 dorm. (She went up fairly happily but was none too pleased to make the trip down.) This early “cow prank” set a trend that inspired the title of Neil Steinberg’s book about college pranks, If At All Possible, Involve a Cow. The addition of social responsibility to the hackers’ creed in the late twentieth century made them revert to fiberglass bovinus.

The Dorm Goblin moved on to more technical pranks, like turning dormitory phones into radio speakers, which allowed students to fill their rooms with the latest tunes by taking the receiver off the hook. The Goblin was also more than likely responsible for launching the door hacking tradition that persisted for decades (see Door Man).

Since the earliest days of the Dorm Goblin, one underlying motivation behind MIT pranks has been to conquer the inaccessible and make possible the improbable. Often hackers have employed this vision in the creation of surrealist still lifes or absurd dioramas — a telephone booth on top of one of the Institute’s signature domes, for example, or a dormitory room set up on the frozen Charles River. Full-size sailboats have found their way into moats and swimming pools. But making possible the improbable requires skill, attention to detail, and careful research. In 1976, for example, hackers consulted an arachnologist and examined spider webs with an electron microscope before constructing the multi-storied Burton Spider Web with 1,250 feet of nylon rope and steel wire.

If you are interested in some of the more recent hacks at MIT, take a look at IHTFP's gallery of MIT hacks.