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A little history about railroad tracks.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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