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From: "Thomas y Reina Jakits" <rijakits@cwpanama.net>
To: "Rotary motors in aircraft" <flyrotary@lancaironline.net>
References: <list-1610326@logan.com>
Subject: Re: [FlyRotary] Re: metric system - 
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2006 23:34:32 -0500
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Dave, close but not excatly right!

Here the copy of a post from the Atlantica-list (Wingco - BWB - aircraft):

JUST A QUESTION OF STANDARDS

Especially this part.
Does the statement, "We've always done it that way" ring any bells...?
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.


Okay! 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 United States 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 spec and told we have always done it
that way and wonder what horse's ass came up with that, 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, 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. 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 ??
Correction: Horses arse!!

TJ :))


>
> On 27, Nov , at 7:07 AM, Sandy wrote:
>
>> Let me make sure I have this right.
>> Two horse's ass's (how do you spell the plural of ass?) determined the
>> diameter of the Space Shuttle booster rockets.  Is that about it?
>>
>  Ass is another name for a donkey; the word you want is 'arse' and the 
> plural of arse is arses
> The width of a roman road was determined by the wheel tracks of a roman 
> war chariot drawn by two horses side by side. When the railroads were 
> developed in England they followed the main arterial roads which were 
> originally the roman roads, so the rails were laid on the wheel tracks; 
> about 5 feet apart. 19th century rail technology in the US came from 
> England so US railroads indirectly were based on roman roads. The space 
> shuttle boosters were designed to be transported by rail so the width was 
> based on roman two horse chariots.
> That is about it, BR, Dave McC
>
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