RE: [Embedlets-dev] light reading, off topic

[Christopher S. <cs...@oo...>]

Very good! This sounds like a John Burke - Scientific American Connections
column and PBS series of the same name.

>
> Topic tags:[ARCH][JAPL][WIRING][DOCS][MGMT][STRATEGY][NEWBIE]
> _______________________________________________
>
> 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...!
>
>
>
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