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INTERESTING HISTORY LESSON

Railroad tracks.. This is fascinating.

Be sure to read the final paragraph;
your understanding of it will depend
on the earlier part of the content.

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 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. 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 control almost everything... and
CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling
everything else.