Given my Love of Rome, I thought this was appropriate. (received in an e mail)
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 Scotland, and Scottish expatriates designed
the US railroads.
Why did the Scottish 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 long distance roads in
Scotland, 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
Scotland)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 two horses' asses. And you thought
being a horse's ass wasn't important ? Ancient horses' asses control almost
everything.. and current Horses' Asses in government are controlling everything
else !
.
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