WARNING : Contains minor adult language !!
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.
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"A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a thousand men with guns."? MARIO PUZZIO
?Now, ?for your history lesson today...........?
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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.
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Why ?was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in?England, and English expatriates designed the?US ??railroads.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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?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.??
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?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.??
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?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.??
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?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).??
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??Now, the twist to the story:??
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?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.??
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??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.?
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?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??? ?
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