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Hello Everyone,
I have attached something light for your amusement and reflection during the long weekend. Stan Loo
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Significance of an
Ass
Does the statement, "We've always done it that way" ring
any bells?
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!
But 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 specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, 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 at 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.
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