Theos-Talk Archives (November 1999 Message tl00198)

----- Original Message -----

> From host: SHINES
> Posted to conference: MailBox
> Message 2       15/11/99  5:20 pm
> Subject: historical measurements
> From:  Richard Granger (Switzerland)
>
> Subject: historical measurements
> Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 18:20:39 +0100
>
>
> For your interest ...
>
> * * * * * * * * * *
>
 The standard railway gauge (distance between rails) in Canada and the
United States is 4 feet 8  inches.  What a peculiar measurement.  Why
was that
gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and it was English
expatriates that built the Canadian and US railways.  Why did the
English build them like that?  Because the first rail lines were built
by the
same people who previously built tramways, and that's the gauge they
used.
Why did they use that gauge then?  Because the people who built the
tramways used the jigs and tools that they used in 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 was the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads?  The first long-distance roads
throughout Europe (including England) were built by Imperial Rome for
its legions.  The roads have been used ever since.  And the ruts?  Roman
war
chariots made the initial ruts, which everyone else subsequently had to
match for fear of damaging their wagon wheels and wagons.  Since the
chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the
matter of wheel spacing.
Thus, we have the answer to the original question.  The standard North
American railway gauge of 4 feet 8  inches derives from the original
specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.  Specifications and
bureaucracies live forever.  And so, the next time you are handed a
specification and wonder which horse's rear came with it, you may be
exactly right.  Because the Roman war chariots were made just wide
enough to
accommodate the back end of two war horses.
And that's not all:  this story about railroad gauges and horses'
behinds goes further.  When we see a space shuttle sitting on its launch
pad,
we see two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel
tank.
 These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs, and for each shuttle launch
two new
ones are needed.  The firm Thiokol makes the SRBs at its factory in
Utah.
 The engineer who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a
bit
fatter, but they had to be shipped by train from the factory to the
launch
site.  The railway line from the factory had to run through a mountain
tunnel.  The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.  The tunnel is
slightly wider than the railway tracks, and the railway track is about
as wide
as two horses' behinds.
So one of the key design features of what is arguably the world's most
advanced aerospace transport system was determined by the width of a
horse's ass.