Importance of Horse's Rear End

[고병걸]

Boy, we were lucky when we were taking an elective course ("History of Industry & Science" - Gene M. will staighten out my recollection)! Had Instructor Park (or Kim?) known about the following, he would have gotten real kick by asking us to submit a term paper titled "Importance of Horse's Rear End.

So much of old days. Here it goes!

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4' 8.5". Why this odd number?

Because that's the way they built them in England and English expatriates built the US 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.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that 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's the spacing of the wheel ruts (rut: a groove made by passage of vehicles).

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 US standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariots. 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 army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.

End of story? Not yet.

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pads, there are two big solid rocket boosters (SRBs) attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. The SRBs are made by Morton-Thiokol at their factory at Utah. (Mormon company which mines rock salt and sell it under "Morton" brand.) 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 lauch 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 ther railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle desigh feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by a width of a horse's rear.

Hope this story made you laugh. Byung-Gul

[응태]

이 이야기 너무 재미있다. 나는 이거 100 % 진짜라고 믿는다.

[윤동섭]

그래 무어던지 처음이 중요하지.암 첫단추가 말일쎄.아마도 이런 유사한 예가 bottle size나 소줏잔 크기하든가 하는 게 다그런것 아닐가? 좋은 글일쎄.