1. Why are there so few horses and so many horses' asses?
2. I then remembered this item from 2 or 3 years ago.
So, I pulled it up and offer it to you.
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This is the first time I ever publish a story that I get through email networks. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I do. I even went to the trouble to go to www.snopes.com for you. http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp
If you have some time, relax, put a smile on and enjoy.
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the 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 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.
Why did the wagons have that particularly 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. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a Specification/ Procedure/ Process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with it?' you may be exactly right.
Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.) 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, or 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, and 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 x 2.
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And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything...and CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else !!
Here's a piece of totally useless information for you. When Generalisimo Franco was the dictator in Spain, he changed the width of the railroad tracks throughout the country. This assured that no train carrying troops and/or munitions from outside Spain could successfully enter the country.
Here's a nasty joke. These mounted police in Europe always travel in pairs. That is because one knows how to read and the other knows how to write.
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