AN INTERESTING HISTORY LESSON
Railroad tracks. This is fascinating.
Be sure to read the final paragraph; your understanding of it will
depend on the earlier part of the content.
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.
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. 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 it?' 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' *****.) 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 SRB's. The SRB's are made by Thiokol
at
their factory in Utah.
The engineers who designed the SRB's would have
preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's had to be
****pped
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 SRB's 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 trans****tation 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 im****tant?
Ancient horse's ***** control almost everything... and CURRENT
Horses
***** are controlling everything else.
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