Why 4 FEET 8.5 Inches is Very Important
Fascinating Stuff . .
.
Railroad Tracks
The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails)
The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails)
is 4 feet, 8.5 inches.
That's an exceedingly
odd number.
Why was that gauge used?
Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way
they built them in England,
and English
expatriates designed 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 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 old, long distance roads in England, because
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
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe
(including England)
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.
In other words,
bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you
are handed a specification,
procedure, or 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.
Now, the twist to the
story:
When you see a Space
Shuttle sitting on its launch pad,
you will notice that
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 larger,
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
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!
Now you know, Horses' Asses control almost everything.
Explains a whole lot
of stuff, doesn't it?
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