[Jokes4u] GOOD ENGINEERING LASTS FOREVER

[Steve Bailey]

   The U.S. standard gauge (distance between rails) is 4 feet 8.5 inches.
That is an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's
the way they built them in England, and the U.S. railroads were built by
English expatriates

   Why did the English build them that way?

   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?

   Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools
that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

   So why did the wagons have that particular odd 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 was 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?

   The ruts in the roads, which everyone had to match for fear of their
destroying wagon wheels, were first formed by Roman war chariots. Since the
chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the
matter of wheel spacing.

   The U.S standard railway gauge of 4 feet-8.5 inches derives from the
original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot. 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 end of two war horses.

   Thus we have the answer to the original question. Now for the twist 
to the
story.

   When we see a space shuttle sitting on its launching pad, there are two
booster rockets attached to the side of the main fuel tank. These are solid
rocket boosters, or SRB's. The SRB's are made by Thiokol at their 
factory in
Utah.

   The engineers who designed the SRB's might have preferred to make them a
bit fatter, but the SRB's had to be shipped by train from the factory to 
the
launch site. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a small
tunnel in the mountains. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad
track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' rumps.

   So, a 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 rump!

   Don't you just love engineering?