The Corporate Mind
> ------------------
>
> Here is a look into the corporate mind that is very interesting,
> educational, historical, completely true, and hysterical all at the
> same time:
>
> The US standard railroad gauge (width between the two 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 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? The first long distance roads in
> Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions.
> The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads? Roman
> war chariots first formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to
> match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots
> were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter
> of wheel spacing. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4
> feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an
> Imperial Roman war chariot. Specifications 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 war chariots were made just wide enough to
> accommodate the back ends of two war horses. Thus, we have the answer
> to the original question.
>
> Now the twist to the story..............
>
> There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges
> and horses' behinds. When we 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. 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 from the factory had 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 is
> about as wide as two horses' behinds. So, the major 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! |
