YOU
GOTTA' READ IT TO THE END
The US standard
railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5
inches. That's an
exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge
used?
Because that's the way
they built them in England, and English expatriates
built the US
Railroads.
Why did the English build
them like that?
Because the first rail
lines were built by the same people who built the
pre-railroad tramways, and
that's the gauge they used.
Why did "they" use that
gauge then?
Because the people who
built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that
they used for building
wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Okay! Why did the wagons
have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use
any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break
on some of the old, long
distance roads in England, because that's the
spacing of the wheel
ruts.
So who built those old
rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the
first long distance roads in Europe (and England)
for their legions. The
roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the
roads?
Roman war chariots formed
the initial ruts, which everyone else had to
match for fear of destroying
their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were
made for Imperial Rome, they were
all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
The United States standard
railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived
from the original
specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. And
bureaucracies live
forever.
So the next time you are
handed a spec and told we have always done it that
way and wonder what
horse's ass came up with that, you may be exactly
right, because the Imperial
Roman war chariots were made just wide enough
to accommodate the back ends of
two war horses.
Now the twist to the
story...
When you see a Space
Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big
booster rockets attached
to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are
solid rocket boosters, or SRBs.
The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their
factory in Utah. The engineers who
designed the SRBs would have preferred
to make them a bit fatter, but the
SRBs had to be shipped by train from the
factory to the launch
site.
The railroad line from the
factory happens to run through a tunnel in the
mountains. The SRBs had to fit
through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly
wider than the railroad track,
and the railroad track, as you now know, is
about as wide as two horses'
behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle
design feature of what is arguably the world's
most advanced transportation
system was determined over two thousand years
ago by the width of a Horse's
ass.
And you thought being a
horse's ass wasn't important ??
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