Who knows why things are the way they are.

Something I got at school; I hope you enjoy it.

     Who said Engineering wasn't an exact  science?

     The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4  feet,
8.5

     inches. (Wonder how much that is in metric?)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 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 backend came up with
it,
     you may be exactly right.  Because  the Imperial Roman chariots were
     made to be just wide enough to accommodate  the backends of two war
     horses.  Now the twist to the story....

     There's an interesting extension of the story about railroad gauge  and
     horses' behinds.  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
backside!

     " Good Grief Charle Brown!"

>From: t obrien <robot_works@HOTMAIL.COM>
>Reply-To: t obrien <robot_works@HOTMAIL.COM>
>To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
>Subject: Re: SI vs. dumb (0 cc's Vanagon content)
>Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1999 00:48:44 GMT
>
>>Can anyone tell me, why we didn't switch in 1976 to the simple, clean,
>>easy-to-use metric system from the backwards, inches/fluid
>>ounces/furlongs/quarts/drams/pints/rods/tablespoons/acres/yards/pounds/cups
>>system?
>
>We did. It was short circuited by the Reagan Revolution. *L*
>
>Just look at highways built in the late 70's. Like the one from going south
>out of Tuscon AZ. All the signs were in Metric with miles subtitles.
>After two years in Germany in the late 70's, I still convert quite easily
>from English to metric and back. Not a problem.
>
>
>
>
>tim
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