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Let’s watch MIT students throw another piano off a dorm roof, shall we?
A unique reminder to drop that class before it's too late.
It’s like a scene straight out of a cartoon.
A piano seemingly falls from the sky, but this time, no one gets hurt.
Honoring a 50-year tradition, dozens of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students gathered Tuesday as a piano was pushed off the roof of the Baker House on campus.
According to MIT, the tradition stems back to 1972 when some residents of Baker House sought to dispose of a broken piano in the dormitory.
Someone suggested throwing it out the window, but the student handbook prevented anything from being thrown from windows. Charlie Bruno, class of 1974, noticed that the handbook did not mention anything about throwing things off of dorm roofs. Once this was confirmed, students made a plan and the piano was dropped.
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And soon enough, a tradition was born.
These days, the piano drop coincides with “Drop Day,” or the last day MIT students can drop classes for the spring semester.
For anyone concerned about the pianos, no need to fret. They are all “nonworking, completely beyond repair, and donated to the residence hall instead of being sent to a junkyard,” MIT reports.
Bonus: Bruno’s legacy not only lives on in this tradition 50 years later, but also as a unit of measurement.
A “Bruno” measures the volume of the dent left after a piano is dropped six stories.
From Smoots to Bruno, MIT students are always thinking outside the box.
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