HORSE'S ARSE
Historically Important
Do you know what the space shuttle and the Roman legions have in common? No! Then read on and increase your knowledge of history. (just one more little item that your teachers forgot to tell you.)
Does the statement, "We've always done it that way" sound familiar. If so, maybe there is a reason for it.....
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. Now this is an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Simple, that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads. Now you may ask, why did the English pick that size for their rail lines.
In England the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and they used the same gauge for the railroads as they did for the tramways. Beginning to catch on to the phrase "We've always done it that way" aren't you.
And the question one again, why? And once again, it's simple, the ones who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
So far so good. But we may ask, why did the wagon builders use that particular odd wheel spacing. And once again, it's simple and "always done it that way". If the wagon builders had 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 between the wheel ruts on the old roads.
So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and in 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.
So, 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 for something and wonder just what horse's arse came up with it, you may be exactly right. For it was the horse's arse that made the ruts, the wheel spacing on the wagons and the railroad gauge 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.
Now, as Paul Harvey says, "here is the rest of the story" and why the space shuttle and the Roman legions have something in common.
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 SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in 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 that 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 arse....and you thought being a HORSE'S ARSE wasn't important.