I Am Iron Man (Sorta)

Published May 5, 2010 at 8:25 p.m.
...MIT’s most famous fictional alum, Tony Stark, has some real-life rivals...
Princeton, you can keep your Batman. (Frankly, his costume could use a little work, anyway.)

Review: Iron Man 2. By Peter Keough.

Princeton, you can keep your Batman. (Frankly, his costume could use a little work, anyway.) What better location for a nerd-with-secretly-awesome-powers to begin working on a superhero suit that trumps even Bruce Wayne’s handiwork than Cambridge, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?

MIT alumnus Tony Stark, a/k/a Iron Man, may not have graduated summa cum laude (since you can’t actually do that at MIT), and well, okay, he may not even exist. But though the Iron Man get-up might be a stretch — a Wired article claimed that it would take an entire nuclear plant just to power it — that doesn’t mean that the MIT campus is lacking in Stark-like characters, some of whom have conducted research that rivals Stark’s mindboggling suit of armor.

Take professor of architecture — and Iron (Wo)Man in her own right — J. Meejin Yoon, who designed a “self-defense dress” in the style of porcupine warfare, using only piano wires for spikes. (Yoon insists it was an art project, not anything more belligerent.)

The award for killer haute couture, however, goes to Hugh Herr, whose name rings somewhat close to the real-life inspiration for Tony Stark, Howard Hughes (only without the pesky mental illness).

With eyes the color of steel, hair neatly combed back from a strikingly handsome face, and a dapper suit, Herr looks every bit the part of a superhero. His story takes us back to 1982, when, Herr says, “My goal was to be the best climber in the world.”

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