We don't always know the origins, this may surprize you

[Colin Howard]

Greetings,

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I've recently neded to reinstall my email client and due to an error code
stopping me receiving any emails, we changed my Google account from Pop3 to
IMap, in doing so, I discovered I when starting the client, downloaded
literally hundreds of thousands of emails, going back to mid summer 2018.

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Amongst these, is the following which I hope you will at least find
interesting if not surprizing. It may be I sent this back in 2018, if |I
did, sorry for the duplication.

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The original sender to a group I am on, sent this, I think it's very funny
and often true, what do you think, especially any of our american cousins?

I've had this on file for years - the Space
Shuttle itself is now history. I've no idea who wrote it or how authentic
it is, but whoever wrote it sounds like they knew what they were on about.

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 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. 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 this?", 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 final
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. And you thought being a horse's ass
wasn't important? Ancient horses' asses determined almost everything, while
CURRENT horses' asses are controlling everything else.


Colin Howard from Southern England.