Category: Let's talk
How Standards Are Created Historically
Does the statement, "We've always done it that way" ring any bells?
The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between rails) is 4 feet, 8.5
inchs. 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.
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? Imperial Rome built the first long
distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have
been used ever since.
What about 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.
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 and told we have always
done it that way and wonder what horse's ass came up with that, you may
be exactly right. The Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide
enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.
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. Thiokol
makes the SRBs 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 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?
that's great!
I love that! It's just the type of logical strangeness that is really cool