Dear All,
This is actually pretty funny.
Does the expression, "We've always done it that way!" ring any bells?
When we see the Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there aretwo big
booster rockets attached to the sides of the main tank. These are solid
rocket boosters, or SRB's. "Thiokol" makes the SRB's at their factory in
Utah. The engineers who designed the SRB's might have preferred tomake
them a bit fatter, but the SRB's had to be shipped by train from the
factory to the launch site in Florida. The railroad line from the factory
happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRB's had to fit
through that tunnel. The tunnel is only slightly wider than the railroad
track. The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails)is 4
feet, 8.5 inches. That is an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge
used? Because that is the way they built them in England, and English
expatriates built the U.S. railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who builtthe
pre-railroad tramways, and that is 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 the same 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 onsome
of the old, long distance roads in England, because 4 feet, 8.5 inchesis
the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe and inEngland
for their legions. Those same roads have been used ever since.
And what determined the spacing of the ruts in the Roman roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, and everyone else had tomatch
the rut spacing or risk destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots
were made for Imperial Rome, they all had the same wheel spacing.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches isderived
from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So the next time youare
handed a specification and wonder which horse's ass in your companycame
up
with it, you may be exactly right that it was, indeed, a horse's ass.
This is because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wideenough
to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.
And now we know why a major design feature of what is the world's most
advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand yearsago
by the width of a horse's ass!
