Horse’s Asses
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.
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 Romebuilt
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. 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 it?’,
you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were
made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses.
(Two horse’s 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 SRB’s. The SRB’s are made by
Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRB’s
would 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 happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and
the SRB’s 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? Ancient horse’s asses
controlled almost everything… and current horse’s asses are
controlling everything else.
