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2007/01/09, 11:15 AM
This came across my email today....sorry, these things happen when your a bit of a geek...but I thought I'd share it anyway....kind of interesting....
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Railroads and Rocket Science!
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! 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 army
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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