I was reading the latest issue of Popular Science and came across their ‘Extra Credit’ article: Engineering the Ultimate Prank. If you have lived in this society, then you’ve heard about the Caltech/MIT prank wars or similar campus pranks at least a dozen times. For the most part it’s background noise if you don’t belong to any institution, but I highly suggest that you take the time to read a little about the spice of life pranks for an appreciation of knowledge and skill put to clever use.

Reading about the Rose Bowl scoreboard hack for a UCLA/Illinois game “Caltech 38 / MIT 9″ it brought tears to my eyes *sniff* That’s just awesome times ten.

(the following found on the Popular Science website, MIT site, and Wiki)
MIT
Photo by Michael Bauer; Eri Izawa
While Caltech students would argue otherwise, MIT has become to nerdy pranks what USC is to football. Befitting such a science and technology oriented school, MIT calls its pranks “hacks”, and many of them focus on the school’s great dome. Throughout the years students have wrapped the great dome in a replica of the one ring from Lord of the Rings, converted the dome to look like R2-D2 and even landed a replica of the Wright brother’s flier on the top of the dome. Much like Caltech’s pranks at the Rose Bowl, MIT likes to prank the annual Harvard-Yale football game, launching pro-MIT banners attached to a weather balloon that rose from the field in 1982 and attached to a model rocket launched from the end zone in 1990.

Georgia Tech
Photo by Disavian (CC Licensed)
Georgia Tech’s most famous prank wasn’t a single prank but a decades-long conspiracy of pranks advancing the life of a fake student named George Burdell. The prank began in 1926 when a student received two enrollment forms. The student sent both back, one with his real name and one as Burdell. For the next four years, the student did all of his class work twice, once as himself and once as Burdell, earning Burdell a BA in 1930 and a few years later, a masters degree. During WWII, Georgia Tech alumni added Burdell’s name to bomber crew lists, sending him on missions across the European theater. After Georgia Tech computerized class selection and enrollment, students hacked the computers, adding Burdell to the school’s rolls numerous times over the last thirty years.

The University of Chicago
Photo by The University of Chicago
At the University of Chicago, the prank spirit gets channeled into the annual giant scavenger hunt. Started in 1987, the four day long “Scav Hunt” pits dorm against dorm in competitions like “build a bong shaped like Emile Durkheim” or “recreate Guernica on someone’s back in toothmarks”. However, the most famous Scav Hunt moment came in 1999 when students Justin Kasper and Fred Niell made plutonium in a nuclear reactor they assembled from random junk they found in the physics department. The next year, the same dorm made a replica V2 rocket in honor of Gravity’s Rainbow, proving that the dorm Burton-Judson had a more advanced nuclear weapons program than Iraq.

University of Wisconsin
Photo by jessanderson.org
While not as purely intellectual as the other schools on the list (they actually have good sports teams at Wisconsin), the U of W Madison is a legendary prank school. Under the title of a student government political party named “Pail and Shovel”, a group of Wisconsin students constructed a life sized replica of the head and right arm of the Statue of Liberty on the frozen lake by the school. The party claimed that they had shipped the real statue over from New York, but that it had fallen through the ice with only the arm and head tall enough to poke out. Unfortunately, everyone had seen them building the giant model, ruining the surprise but not diminishing the engineering effort.

Caltech
Photo by Museum of Hoaxes/Caltech
While the prototypical Caltech prank resembles a 1975 gag where some students used a computer to win a car from McDonald’s, the most famous pranks revolve around the Rose Bowl. Since no Caltech team will ever play in the Rose Bowl, the annual game has been a constant target. In 1984, Caltech students hacked into the Rose Bowl scoreboard to read “Caltech 31, MIT 9”. However, the nerdiest prank in Caltech history involved former student Bruce Montgomery inscribing Caltech fraternity jokes onto the Voyager spacecrafts, ensuring Caltech pranks will one day reach the farthest reaches of the galaxy.
At left, two of Caltech’s infamous name-in-lights pranks. In 1961, 30 million Rose Bowl viewers were stunned when the Washington Huskies unwittingly began cheering the small, neighboring technical school. Ten years later, pulled a similar prank on the Hollywood sign.

MIT hack

An MIT hack is defined as a clever, benign, and ethical prank or practical joke at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The MIT hack is rarely harmful and is usually set out to demonstrate a physical challenge for the MIT undergraduate. Rather, these pranks become the center of attention and establish the jovial character of the college’s students. Hacks may be fiendishly clever, but they are not malicious or destructive.

The most famous hacks have been the weather balloon saying “MIT”, which popped up out of the ground on the 50 yard line at the Harvard/Yale football game, and The Great Dome Police Car Hack, where the body shell of a campus-police car mysteriously appeared on the top of the almost inaccessible Great Dome one morning, complete with a dummy cop and a dozen donuts.[1] The Dome served as a range for life-sized model cows, borrowed from the Hilltop Steak House in Saugus, MA, in the 70s. The Great Dome was also “dressed” as R2-D2 to celebrate the release of Star Wars Episode I. In 2001, to celebrate the release of the first Lord of the Rings film, a yellow banner complete with Elvish script, representing the inscription on the “one ring,” was found surrounding the Dome on the morning of the opening. More recently, the MIT Dome was the site of another famous hack—when a replica of the 1903 Wright Brothers’ Plane appeared there, celebrating 100 years since the Brothers’ famous flight.

Famous hacks
Though hacks are fairly common on the campus, a few hacks have stood the test of time.

One hack involved a police car with its warning lights running. The unusual aspect of this hack was its position—on top of MIT’s Great Dome. The car was found to be a gutted, junked, heavy Chevrolet, painted meticulously to match the MIT Campus Police patrol cars. The car’s number was pi. Its license plate read “IHTFP”, the acronym for MIT’s unofficial slogan. A dummy dressed as a campus patrolman was seated inside with his box of donuts.

Due to MIT’s proximity to Harvard, many hacks involve the annual Harvard-Yale football game. Because of the Cambridge rivalry between MIT and Harvard, hackers often are found at the games and have come up with some of the most famous hacks in the Institute’s history.

One notable hack attempt targeting the 1948 Harvard-Yale football game involved the use of primer cord. One night shortly before the game MIT students snuck into the Harvard stadium and buried primer cord just under the field. The plan was to burn the letters MIT into the middle of the field during the game. However, their work was uncovered by groundskeepers and disabled. During the game the hackers were apprehended while wearing heavy coats on a fair-weather day. The coats were lined with batteries, obviously intended to be used to detonate the primer cord. An apocryphal story is that an MIT dean came to their defense, opening his own battery-lined coat and claiming that “all Tech men carry batteries”; an MIT dean did show up, but he was not wearing batteries. This phrase has since become common among MIT students.

The Harvard-Yale football game was again the target of MIT hacks in 1982 when a weather balloon painted with “MIT” all around it was inflated seemingly from nowhere in the middle of the field. In 1990 an MIT banner was successfully launched from an end zone using a model rocket engine shortly before Yale attempted a field goal kick. The next day the Boston Herald ran the headline “MIT 1–Harvard-Yale 0: Tech Pranksters Steal the Show.”

The cleverness of many MIT hacks has even resulted in urban legends about supposed hacks. One rumored hack involved a certain student’s adherence to classical conditioning behavior response. Throughout the off-season this supposed student visited the Harvard football stadium during his lunch break. He dressed in a black and white striped shirt and trousers, filled his pockets with bird-seed, then went on the field, blew a whistle, and spread his birdseed on the field. The result of all of this effort, the story goes, is that on opening day as the Harvard football team took the field to face their opponent, the referee blew his whistle to signal the start of the game, and the field was suddenly inundated by a flock of birds looking for their lunch. Despite sounding like a classic MIT hack, this particular prank has never been verified. The author of a 1990 book about pranks pulled by MIT students stated that he had not come across this tale during his years of research.

When MIT installed new lighting to illuminate the Great Dome, hackers started changing the color of the lights to reflect various occasions–Earth Day, the Fourth of July, etc.

Caltech rivalry
MIT and Caltech have been going at each other with pranks for several years now. Recently, a group of Caltech students, during the admitted students program at MIT in 2005, pulled a string of pranks, including covering up the word Massachusetts in the “Massachusetts Institute of Technology” engraving on the main building façade with a banner so that it read “That Other Institute of Technology”. A group of MIT hackers responded by altering the banner so that the inscription read “The Only Institute of Technology”.

MIT retaliated in April 2006, when students posing as the Howe & Ser Moving Company stole the 130 year old, 1.7 ton Fleming House cannon and moved it to their campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, repeating a similar prank performed by Harvey Mudd College in 1986. It should be noted that the name “Howe & Ser”, if said rapidly, and if read recognizing that the & symbol is a ligature of the Latin word “et”, sounds like howitzer; it could also mean “how we answer”, since the latest prank was an answer to the 2005 prank on MIT. To add to that, a replica of the famed “brass rat” (MIT’s graduation ring) was machined to fit onto the cannon which was also cleverly pointed towards Caltech. Thirty members of Fleming House traveled to MIT and reclaimed their cannon on April 10, 2006. They were greeted by a group of MIT students, offering them a farewell party.

During MIT’s Campus Preview Weekend in 2007, Caltech distributed a complete fake edition of “The Tech” with the headline article reading “MIT invents the Interweb”. This edition included a mock weather forecast, often referring to how sunny Pasadena (where Caltech is located) is compared to Boston, as well as other tongue-in-cheek articles.

In 2008, Caltech students changed the answer to MIT’s “mystery hunt” to “CALL 1-626-848-3780 ASAP.” When MIT students dialed the number, they heard, “Thank you for calling the Caltech Admissions Office. If you are another MIT student wishing to transfer to Caltech, please download our transfer application form from www.caltech.edu. If you are an MIT student not wishing to transfer to Caltech, we wish you the best of luck, and hope you find happiness someday…. ”

Timeline of well-known hacks

2007
October 2007
MIT students strung a “GO SOX!” banner across the 1,000+ foot span between MacGregor Dormitory and Tang Graduate Dormitory to cheer on the Red Sox during the 2007 World Series.

“GO SOX!” strung between Tang Graduate Dormitory and MacGregor Dormitory, 1000+ feetSeptember 2007
MIT Students adorned the John P. Harvard statue in Harvard Yard with a Halo MJOLNIR armor helmet and assault rifle to commemorate the release of Halo 3.
July 2007
MIT students put a Dark Mark over MIT’s Student Center to celebrate the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

2006

A fire truck on top of the Great Dome, September 11, 2006
Giant Brass Rat on Fleming House cannon at MIT.November 2006
MIT Hackers put a huge Triforce on the Great Dome. It was in commemoration of the release of the video game The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.[7]
September 2006
In Mid-September, part of the side of Simmons Hall was turned into a giant blue LED display.
11 September 2006
An “MIT Fire Department” fire truck was placed on the Great Dome, presumably to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
August 2006
A welcome back poster and a few dozen rubber ducks in the name of Simmons Hall at MIT appeared on the Caltech campus in mid-August. They were accompanied by posters that presented proposed renovations to add Simmons-like architectural elements (particularly the ones often regarded as useless by MIT students) to Caltech dormitories, which were undergoing renovation.
06 April 2006
A 130 year-old, 3+ ton cannon was moved from California Institute of Technology to MIT via a fake moving company “Howe & Ser Moving Co.” This marked the 20th anniversary when 11 students from Harvey Mudd College removed the cannon from the front of the Fleming House. The cannon was situated in a prominent place on campus and was adorned with a unique Brass Rat. It was symbolically pointed at its previous owner, Caltech. Thirty members of Fleming House traveled to MIT and reclaimed their cannon on April 10, 2006. They left a toy cannon with the note, “Here’s something more your size.”
28 February 2006
Giant Model Torino 2006 Olympics Medal on the Great Dome.

2004
15 September 2004
A small alcove in the Infinite Corridor was covered by a painted plank of wood with a door. The “room” inside was named and labeled the Vannevar Shrubbery Room, a parody of the larger Vannevar Bush Room, whose entrance location had changed due to renovations.

2003
17 December 2003
A mock-up of the first Wright Brothers airplane was placed on the Great Dome, in honor of the 100th anniversary of their first powered flight.
23 April 2003
Hundreds of gnomes of various shapes and sizes appeared in and around the W20 Student Center Athena cluster.

Older well-known hacks
09 May 1994
A carefully assembled outer frame of a car painted as an MIT Campus Police car appeared on top of the Great Dome. This hack quickly gained recognition on many local news sources and on national television.
October 1958
Oliver R. Smoot, a pledge of MIT’s Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity in 1958, was used to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge. As he lay on the bridge (that carries Massachusetts Avenue across the Charles River), markers were made at each distance between his head and feet. The bridge was determined to be 364.4 Smoots (and one ear) in length, and the markers remain to this day.

http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2008/do_not_hack/

http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/