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2002-03-28
This one is circulating again!
John
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, 2002-03-28 10:32
Subject: [ISO8601] How do standards come to be?
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 England, and
English expatriates built the U.S. Railroads. 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? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and
England) for their legions. The 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.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5
inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war
chariot. 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.
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 at 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. 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 a horse's ass.
... and you thought
being a HORSE'S ASS wasn't important
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