A Little Ivy League Fun

The Cambridge Chronicle reports today on the re-emergence of an old tradition at the Baker House Dorm at MIT. Apparently, every few years since the early 1970's students in the building have relieved their mid-semester stress through the traditional "Piano Drop" -- coinciding with the last official day to drop classes. The concept is quite simple, the Chronicle points out:

A group of students throw a 700-pound piano off the building's roof just to watch it smash into bits. This year, though, there was an added challenge. On top of pushing the piano over the edge, students also had to make it land on another piano positioned on the grass below.

Furthermore, students write directly on the piano other things they would like to see dropped, including "Harvard" and the "Yankees."

According to the Baker House Piano Drop 2005 website, this is the first such event since 1998, held not only to encourage a "chance for the MIT community to bond over our mutual delight at clever engineering and wanton destruction."

Unfortunately, neither the Chronicle nor Baker House itself was able to expound much on the origins of this tradition. However with our fantastic investigative journalism skills, Bostonist was able to dig up some more information. Apparently, the tradition started in 1972 when a Baker House resident (Charlie Bruno, MIT '74) decided that the best way to get rid of a non-working piano in the dorm was, you guessed it, to toss if from the roof. Yup, this is the very simple impetus of the tradition. But, as Techreview.com points out, "the enterprising students didn't waste the fall." In classic MIT style:

They calculated the piano's plunge at 19 meters per second with an impact of 20,000 kilograms. To verify the results, a piano was dropped off Baker House every year a piano was available, until 1984, when Amherst Alley was relocated away from the residence hall, thus eliminating the test site.

Apparently, the Baker House piano drop has sparked an interest in dropping objects from high places around the MIT campus. Other popular drops include dropping flaming alcohol-saturated watermelons from MacGregor House, and the fall egg drop which encourages students to build machines which will keep eggs safe and unbroken after a 76-meter drop from the Green Building.

Photo courtesy of the Cambridge Chronicle.