Smoot?

At Scrabble the other evening we talked of many things including:
(a) that many people throughout the world could be working on the same thought/idea at the one time (a bit like the notion of a universal unconsciousness) and (b) whether "smoot" is a word.
Then I read this in today's Column 8 in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Apropos of nothing at all, Patrick Delahunty, an architect, wants us to know that the length of New York's Brooklyn Bridge is "364.4 smoots plus one ear". This was established in 1962 by the rolling of one Oliver R. Smoot "end-over-end along the bridge by his colleagues, one smoot being his height of 1.7 metres".