Railroad tracks.
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.
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 "Which horse's ass came up
with this?" and 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' behind.)
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 a horse's behind wasn't important?
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