More On (Moron?) Follow the Leader
Contributed by Kent Fuller
(Not a drag racing story, per se, but
fascinating nonetheless! bp)
Here is a look into the corporate mind that is
very interesting, educational, historical, completely true, and hysterical
all at the same time:
The US standard railroad gauge (width between the two 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 the US railroads were built
by English expatriates.
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
that 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? The first long distance roads in
Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The
roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots first formed the initial ruts,
which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.
Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike
in the matter of wheel spacing.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from
the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
Specifications 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. Thus, we have
the answer to the original question. Now the twist to the story...
There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and
horses' behinds.
When we 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 in
Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might 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 had 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 is about
as wide as two horses' behinds. So, the major 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!
The Fullers