Specifications and Bureaucracies
Live Forever!
The explanation for most things is
often simple. For example:
The Railroad Gauge
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.
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. Many are still in use today.
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 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 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 rear came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because
the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough for
their wheels to miss the back ends of two war horses.
Now the space-age twist to this story: 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 Colorado 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, the Space Shuttle, was defined over 2000
years ago by the width of a horse's ass!
