MIT students weld a streetcar to its rails

1930

In the 1930s Ken Wadleigh, later a dean at MIT, and four others distracted a streetcar motorman and set off small thermite charges to fuse the vehicle's wheels to the rails. It is the earliest specifically documented example in MIT's hack tradition; the institute's records do not attest dated hacks before this. The far better-known Smoot measurement of Harvard Bridge did not follow until October 1958.