Posted on 08/22/2021 5:07:31 AM PDT by sodpoodle
Railroad Tracks
The U.S. 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 U.S. 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 tram ways 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 chariots. In other words, bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification, procedure, or 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.
Now, the twist to the story: When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, you will notice that 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 larger, 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!
So, the only thing more important than a horse’s ass is two horse’s asses.
Possibly because of the rods and chains used for land surveys during westward expansion?
Is Harris on the left side or is Pelosi?
Shaquille O’Neal’s shoe size is 23.
Or as Spock would say, fascinating.
My hand measures exactly 9” so I can quickly measure something. Four hand spans are 36” = one yard.
This has been very useful over the years.
My hand measures exactly 9” so I can quickly measure something. Four hand spans are 36” = one yard.
This has been very useful over the years.
Actually (and I’m trying to make myself look much smarter than I am here), mile comes from “mille pasum”, a thousand paces.
The Roman legions would mark out a thousand paces on their fabulous roads and then mark it with a stone marker (milestone!).
The Legion pace was actually two steps, left foot to left foot (soldier? Remember hut, hut, hut hoo hare four).
Romans were a bit shorter then, and those two steps were about 5 feet, and a thousand would be about 5000 feet, close to our mile.
And back to driving on the right, the biggest impetus was the National Road (today, US 40 in Maryland and Pennsylvania.) It was the first paved highway, made of logs, one wagon wide. Corduroy road.
When you had to pass someone coming the other way, you had to put one side of wheels off the road into the mud and keep the other side on the road. The other teamster would do likewise, avoiding get stuck in the mud.
To avoid having the horse whip hit the oncoming driver in the face, you veered off to the right as you passed.
That’s the sum of my knowledge, as I was in the same study group as Joe Biden.
So I can’t explain why we don’t eat with our forks upside down like the Brits and other Europeans. Maybe that’s why they mash their peas.
Maybe an Urban Legend, but in the pre-computer age I talked with an engineer who worked in Detroit. When looking over specs for an automobile, he noticed that a vertical zero line split the design in half, with the right having positive numbers and the left negatives. The negatives were a pain during calculating. Why? "It's always been done this way".
He said someone looked back in the records and discovered that the original horse and buggy was divided between the horse and carriage, with a vertical line delineating the transition. That spec was carried over into the automotive age.
Very cool information.
Thank you.
I’m passing this along.
I’ve got size 10 sneakers on right now and they measure 12 1/2”. My size 10 work boots however measure 12 1/4”.
So I guess some King was a size 9 but then again, shoes were different back then.
This 2001 article builds on the premise a bit more.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/railroad-gauge-chariots/
.. and ActiveX controls are just DLLs.
Now, the twist to the story: When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, you will notice that 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 larger, 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.
Even worse, Thiokol wanted to build the boosters at the Cape, but the Utah congress person demanded that they be built in Utah to give the jobs to his state. That was the only way to get his necessary vote for the Shuttle project.
So not only did they have to be made smaller to fit through the tunnels, they also had to be segmented for the trip. And then put back together at the Cape with O-rings between each segment.
You remember the O-rings, don’t you?
I was always puzzled by the fathom. Then I worked on an albacore fishing boat. 17 fathom long line was easily measured by playing out the line from one hand to the other with the arms outstretched seventeen times. Yes the math involved with the metric system is much easier, but the traditional system is based on the human body, which most of us have on hand.
If what I want to measure is pretty big, I also use cubits, as in, "six cubits and a span".
Know why Julius Caesar's book, "The Conquest of Gaul," makes no mention of chariots? Because they were obsolete as instruments of war before the Roman Republic was founded. The Romans had little use for them apart from parades and chariot races, which were a major form of entertainment for almost 1000 years.
There might have been ruts left in Britain from all the hand-drawn carts the legions were so fond of but it is unlikely there were any chariots there at all, much less in such number that they left a permanent imprint on the landscape.
And America once had more than 20 'standard' railroad gauges. Most railroads originally were built by venture capitalists, each of whom used whatever gauge he wanted. There was no national movement to standardize them until the industrial support of the War Between the States highlighted the folly of not having a single standard. The first intercontinental railroad used the 4' 8-1/2" gauge but the railroad industry itself didn't adopt the same gauge until 18 years later. The width of wagon ruts in England had absolutely no bearing on the selection. In fact there still are at least half a dozen "narrow" gauges in use across America today.
And Thiokol didn't manufacture the entire SRB on its own. It outsourced some components to other aerospace mfgrs (Pratt & Whitney, el al) and the pieces parts were built all over the fruited plain and shipped to Cape Canaveral for final assembly.
NASA states that the SRBs were 12.17 feet in diameter, which doesn't seem to have been much limited by 4' 8-1/2", probably because it wasn't.
Loved this story :)
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