Gallery: From the Flying Car to the Giant R2-D2: The Greatest MIT Hacks of All-Time
2007 Donna Coveney/MIT01scrabble
MIT is the birthplace of the hacker. Back in the science-loving 1950s, MIT's Tech Model Railroad club developed the ethos that would help drive the evolution of Unix, the internet, open-source software, and so many other cool hacker ideas that echo even today. At MIT, hacking means something a little different than what it means at Facebook (writing cool code for fun) or at the Defcon hacking conference (breaking someone else's code so it works in unexpected ways). MIT hacks are creative, whimsical, and often completely difficult campus pranks orchestrated by anonymous students working with military precision in the dark of night. The good ones come with instructions on how to undo whatever mischief they've created. Traditionally, the university treated hacks with a kind of tacit admiration, best summed up in an unofficial [Hacking Frequently Asked Questions page](http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/misc/faq.html) on the MIT Hacks website: *Q) Does the MIT administration approve or support hacking?* A) No. Hackers who are caught may face legal penalties and fines. Still, this does not stop the administration from appreciating a good hack -- after the fact. The MIT hack is a very human response to the extreme rigors of study at one of the country's preeminent engineering schools. "One of the problems with being a student at MIT is you have no place to hide," says Samuel Jay Keyser, an MIT professor emeritus who has been affiliated with the university since 1962. "You find out how good you really are. " So the hacks are part show-off, part anarchy, part sticking it to the man. "They make fun of the judges and therefore they mitigate the judgments against them," Keyser says. "It's a way of wearing sunglasses against a very bright sun." Beginning with cars and cows dragged to the top of a conspicuous university building, the hacks have become more varied and more complex as time goes on. In 1982, someone inflated a giant black balloon in the middle of a Harvard football game. Just last year, the Green building was abruptly transformed into a 153-pixel Tetris screen. Here are a few of our favorites. __Above: Scrabble__ The MIT campus got peppered with games like Cranium, chess, and Settlers of Catan in this December 2007 hack. Pictured here is a larger than life Scrabble game hoisted to the side of the MIT Media Lab. *Photo: Donna Coveney/MIT*
02flying-car
The year was 1926, and MIT students wouldn't call something like this a "hack" for another 30 years or so. But the idea was timeless: Hoist a Ford up top of a building — in this case the Class of 1893 dormitory — and amaze and delight everyone on campus. Well, everyone except for the poor sods who had to bring it down. *Photo: MIT Museum*
03harvard-yale
On Nov. 20, 1982, Yale was playing Harvard at Harvard Stadium when a black balloon suddenly [inflated on the 46 yard line](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLg2XpY0L3w). Scrawled in white all over the balloon were three letters: MIT. Students with the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity had spent weeks sneaking into Harvard's stadium at night and assembling their device and wiring up to a power source in the field irrigation system. "We just did it because it was there," said DKE Chapter President Bruce Sohn. "We were there to hack the stadium and we did it for the fun of it." Powered by a vacuum-cleaner motor and a freon-driven hydraulic press, the balloon inflated until it burst in a blaze of MIT hacker glory. *Photo: MIT Museum*
04dome-police
To this day, it remains the iconic MIT hack. In May 1992, it looked like a campus police cruiser had somehow driven up on top of MIT's great dome, lights flashing in the early morning sky. The car, it turned out, was the exterior of a Chevy Cavalier assembled on a wooden frame. This hack is a classic because of its loving attention to the little things. Inside, there was a dummy cop, complete with toy gun and a box of donuts. The car's number? "Pi." Its license plate? The unofficial MIT campus motto: [IHTFP](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology#IHTFP).
Donna Coveney/MIT05r2-d2
Whoever has the job of removing crazy objects from MIT's Great Dome is a pretty busy person. We've seen airplanes, trucks and even *Doctor Who'*s time-traveling TARDIS. But this R2-D2 hack, done just days before the 1999 opening of *The Phantom Menace,* holds a special place in our hearts. *Photo: Donna Coveney/MIT*
06tetris
Without a doubt, this is the greatest hack in recent memory. Last year, anonymous hackers turned MIT's Green Building into a 250-foot-high, 17-by-9-pixel screen and used it to play a game of *Tetris.* The building's 153 windows were fitted with custom-built LED boards that could light up in different colors, and the whole operation was wirelessly controlled MIT student paper *The Tech* proclaimed it "[the 'holy grail' of hacks](http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N22/tetris.html)," saying that MIT hackers had been dreaming of this day since Tetris was a hot new game, back in the 1980s. *Photo: [Flickr/Chris Devers](http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdevers/7097911787/sizes/k/)*
07bulletin-board-jungle
When MIT President Charles M. Vest showed up for his first day on the job in October 1990, there was a hitch: He couldn't find his office. The night before, it turned out, hackers had covered his office door with a bulletin board. *Photo: MIT Museum*
08caltech-cannon
It's not an easy thing to steal a two-ton, 111-year-old cannon and ship it 3,000 miles across the country without anyone noticing. But in 2006, MIT hackers calling themselves the Howe & Ser Moving Company did just that. They showed up at Fleming House, a Caltech residence, with a phony work order on March 28, 2006. The work order duped security guards and they carted the cannon off, "barrel, carriage, and tongue," [the *Los Angeles Times* later reported](http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/11/local/me-cannon11). Days later, the cannon reappeared in front of MIT's Green Building, no worse for wear, but now adorned with a giant MIT class ring. The funny thing about this particular hack is that it all happened before. Twenty years earlier, pranksters at Harvey Mudd College had pulled the same we're-movers-with-phony-paperwork stunt to cart off the cannon. "It's not just like stealing a goat," Harvey Mudd cannon-swiper David Somers [told NPR back in 2006](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5331523). "This is an antique more than 100 years old. It weighs two tons. It's an engineering project unto itself just to move this thing without breaking it." *Photo: [Howe & Ser Moving Company](http://www.howeandser.com/)*
09gold-ring
A close-up look at the gold-plated "Brass Rat," ring that was custom-built so hackers could attach it to the cannon. Caltech students tried to remove the cannon under cover of darkness on April 10. It took them a bit longer than expected, but they [eventually returned it home to Caltech.](http://web.archive.org/web/20120320010922/http://www.flemingcannon.com/) *Photo: [Howe & Ser Moving Company](http://www.howeandser.com/)*
10upside-down-lounge
On the morning of April 8, 2010, this classy-looking upside-down lounge materialized on the bottom of the Media Lab Arch, right in front of MIT's Media Lab. It had some nice details including comfy chairs, a billiard table and — naturally — the hack plans. *Photo: [nd-nʎ/](http://www.flickr.com/photos/evanzxcv/4504965363/)/Flickr*
11entertainment-and-hacking
MIT's Lobby 7 has been home to some great pranks, but one of Samuel Jay Keyser's favorites happened in 1994, when hackers expertly inserted carved polystyrene foam boards up high in the lobby to change a lofty marble inscription — "Established for Advancement and Development of Science its Application to Industry the Arts Agriculture and Commerce" — into something a bit more fun. It's a little hard to read in this photo, but the post-hack inscription changes "Agriculture and Commerce" to "Entertainment and Hacking." Keyser loves the hack because it was benign. It was well-executed. And in true MIT tradition, it came with instructions. "In order to remove those panels, you had to rappel down into the open space, and they left instructions on how to do it," he remembers. Years later, Keyser was describing the hack at an MIT Club of Chicago meeting. After the talk, a woman came up to him and said: "If you believe that carving those inscriptions into those boards is easy, think twice." Then she turned around and was gone. *Photo: MIT Museum*
12entertainment-and-hacking-close-up
A close-up look at the spring-loaded hardware used to clamp polystyrene boards into place in the 1994 Lobby 7 hack. *Photo: MIT Museum*
13250-smoots
Boston's Harvard Bridge is 364.4 Smoots long. And the fact that anybody would remember this in 2013 was probably the furthest thing from MIT freshman Oliver Smoot's mind on the October 1958 night that he lay himself down, time and again, along the bridge, allowing his fraternity brothers to measure its length (each Smoot is about 5 feet, 7 inches). It was a fraternity prank, but the next year the bridge's Smoot markers were repainted. Thus, an MIT landmark — and a unique unit of measurement — was born. Smoot himself went on to become a board member of the American National Standards Institute — a standards man through and through. *Photo: MIT Museum*
14tardis
As *Doctor Who* fans know, the best way to sneak a time machine in and out of unsuspecting London is to disguise it as a 1960s British police call box. It's called the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), and it's been a staple of the BBC sci-fi show since 1963, when a glitch in its Chameleon Circuit caused it to be permanently frozen in its swinging '60s form. Here in the United States, however, the TARDIS sticks out. Especially when placed atop MIT's Great Dome. That's what hackers did in 2010. The great thing about this hack is that it showed off the TARDIS's ability to materialize in different places. On Aug. 25, it was spotted atop MIT's Building 7. Five days later, it was on the Great Dome, pictured here. Then, around four months later, it landed atop Caltech's Baxter Hall, where, [according to MIT's Hack Gallery](http://hacks.mit.edu/by_year/2010/tardis/), it "remained parked for many weeks before disappearing again." *Photo: [Flickr/Sushiesque](http://www.flickr.com/photos/sushiesque/4929872330/)*
