A very good lesson in history   


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 US 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 woul d

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 t he Imperial Roman army

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 a rguably 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!

It's the diversions and i wanted to lighten the forums a bit with a funny ish post ^_^

I throughly enjoyed that. thanks.

ps: In the future, we do have an off-topic thread ;)