Original: Although Smoot attended MIT, he was not the same Smoot who was laid end to end to measure the Harvard Bridge between Cambridge and Boston; this was his cousin Oliver R. Smoot, an MIT alumnus who served as the chairman of the American National Standards Institute.
Simplified: Smoots cousin, Oliver R. Smoot, also studied at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and was made famous for the Smoot measurement of the Harvard Bridge between Cambridge and Boston.