I put this post in humour so move it if required. Anyone know if there is any truth to this? (I've seen this a while back but had forgotton about it) I edited out some politicle references.
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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 '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? Historically, ancient
horse's asses
controlled almost everything related
to transportation...
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