O.T. Standards

Thought I'd share this with you all :-)


A Horse's Ass IS Important

[Does the statement, "We've always done it that way" ring any bells? The
U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5
inches. That's an odd number, don't you think? Why was that gauge used?]

- Because that's the way they built railroads in England, and English
expatriates built the U.S. Railroads. 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. Then
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?

- Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and
England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the
ruts in the roads?

- Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to
match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were
made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel
spacing. The U.S. standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is
derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war
chariot 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...

Now the twist to the story... When you 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 (SRBs). The SRBs
are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed
the SRBs would 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 happens 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, as you
now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So, a major Space
Shuttle 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.

And you thought being a Horse's Ass wasn't important...