What Horses Ass Designed That?
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 designed
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 had used for building wagons, which used that wheel
spacing.
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 (including England ) for their legions. Those roads
have been used ever since.
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. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet,
8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman
war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.
So the
next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder ‘What horse’s
ass came up with this?’, you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots
were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two
horses’ asses.)
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, and 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? Ancient horse’s asses control almost everything...
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