Railroad tracks. This is very interesting.
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 designed 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 had 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 (including England )
for their legions. Those 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 this?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots
were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war
horses. (Two horses' 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 SRBs. 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, and 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 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.