Designed by a Horse's A **

[Tom]

No, this is not something I created but I wish I had.  It's one of those pieces of trivia that you recieve in the email where you have to open 8 or 10 windows to get to it.   Usually I don't bother but I'm glad I did this time.
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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 the US railroads were built by English expatriates.

Why did the English people 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 use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts. So who built these old rutted roads?

The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts?

The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made by, or for, Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

Thus we have the answer to the original questions.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Specs and Bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right - because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses.

When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might 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 to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse's ass.  :P

[Gordon]

Now Tom I must say that is one time tested measure. Who in the days of the Romans would have thought they were actually going to have something to do directly with space travel. Or would that be indirectly related?

Go figure
Gordon

[Bud Man]

And we all try to re-invent the wheel everyday ! :D

[HORSELOGGER]

 ;D

[Paul_H]

There are more than a few Government regulations and policies, that probably have similar origins. ;)

I found this thread buried down in the basement on page 10.
The General Board has 24 pages of older threads.There is a vast amount of knowledge,trivia and good old fashioned BS down there. :P

It's well worth checking out.

[Frank_Pender]

Gee if you folks would have only asked,  I use to teach this very thing.  :P I wonder, does this make me a two horse hitch or a six horse hitch.  It all falls in the roadway.  Then you had to have street sweepers.  In ancient Rome, too?   "As the Biscuit Falls" 8) 8) 8)

[Texas Ranger]

As my aggie friends in college used to tell me, and now I believe, Engineers are horses ass's! 8)

[Jeff]

Thanks for digging this one up Paul! I enjoyed reading it again.

Yea, I still go down in the depths of the forum and reread some things when I have time. There is great material here and a wealth of information. I encourage folks to make a post on something they might find in the archives that they feel should see the light of day again. Maybe I need to have a contest again where I bury something down there for ya'll to try to find.

[J Beyer]

I think the same thing every time a new corporate policy comes through the pipeline.  Myself and several others almost say in unison, "Which desk jockey (or horse's ass) that never worked in a store came up with that idea.  I mean really, they even specify shades of red and Khaki tan tthat are approved colors to wear.  And if you violate this color code, you are sent home or told to buy a different shirt or pant.  Of course, store management does not give a crap about the color code, they just posted the policy and left it at that.

JB

[Eggsander]

That is a good one.
Don, we, ahem, engineers are not all horses asses (some may actually be worse than that), we are not however above making use of horses asses in whatever way necessary to make the world a better place in which to live.  :D
I'm gonna forward this link to an old college buddy of mine, he's one of them rocket scientists that you speak of.  ;D