Re: horses and space shuttles

Oh, thank you, Ed!! Now I can sleep at night. I have wondered about that
for years, almost as much as wondering how the astronauts go potty. Could
you help out on that one?

Neal


"Ed Chait" <edchait4remove@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:0e-dnURUSN2sA6zVnZ2dnUVZ_hzinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet,
8.5 inches. That is an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and the U.S. railroads
were built by English expatriates. Why did the English build them that
way? 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 & tools that they used for building wagons, which used that
wheel spacing. So why did the wagons have that particular odd 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? The ruts in the roads, which everyone had to match for fear of
destroying their wagon wheels, were first formed by Roman war chariots.

Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome,they were all alike
in the matter of wheel spacing. The U.S. 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 end of two war
horses.

Thus we have the answer to the original question. Now the twist to the
story... When we see a space shuttle sitting on its launching pad, there
are two booster rockets attached to the side of the main fuel tank. These
are solid rocket boosters, or SRB's. The SRB's are made by Thiokol at
their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRB's might have
preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's had to be shipped by
train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the
factory had to run thru a tunnel in the mountains. 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!






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