[Embedlets-dev] light reading, off topic

[Brill P. <bri...@ro...>]

Ok, this *is* off topic, but I thought it was interesting enough seeing as
we're defining specifications. I have no idea who wrote it... it came in the
mail with all the stuff friends send you:

>And you wonder why...! The US standard railroad gauge (width between the
two 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 the
US railroads were built by English expatriates. 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?
The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial
Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in
the roads? Roman war chariots first formed the initial ruts, which everyone
else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the
chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the
matter of wheel spacing. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4
feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial
Roman war chariot. Specifications 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.
Thus, we have the answer to the original question. Now the twist to the
story...! There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad
gauges and horses' behinds. When we 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
might 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 had 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 is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So,
the major 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 wonder why we are the way we are...!