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Origins of engineering specs

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  • Origins of engineering specs

    Origins of engineering specs

    Subject: Origins of engineering specs and government
    decisions. Ever wonder where engineering specifications come from?

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

    Why did the English build them like that?

    Because the first rail lines were built by the people who built the
    pre-railroad tramways, and that is the gauge they used.

    Why did they use that particular gauge then?

    Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools
    that they used for building wagons, which used the same 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 the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the
    spacing of the wheel ruts in the granite sets.

    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 (or by) Imperial Rome, they all had the same wheel spacing.

    The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is
    derived from the specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

    Specifications and Bureaucracies live forever.

    The Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to
    accommodate the back ends of two war-horses.

    Now let's cut to the present...

    The Space Shuttle, sitting on its launch pad, has two booster rockets
    attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket
    boosters, or SRBs. A company builds SRBs at its factory in Utah. The
    engineers who designed the SRBs wanted 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 has to run through a tunnel in the
    mountains.

    The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel, which is slightly wider than
    the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses'
    behinds.

    So.... a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most
    advanced transportation system was determined two thousand years ago
    by a horse's ass.

    Which is pretty much how most government decisions are made.
    Brian (the devil incarnate)

  • #2
    Does the U.S. standard railroad gauge come directly from the width of Roman chariots?


    And a better breakdown of this oft repeated, poorly researched "essay." http://www.straightdope.com/columns/000218.html
    Gigabyte P35-DS3L with a Q6600, 2GB Kingston HyperX (after *3* bad pairs of Crucial Ballistix 1066), Galaxy 8800GT 512MB, SB X-Fi, some drives, and a Dell 2005fpw. Running WinXP.

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    • #3
      And this has :
      A: been posted before
      B: Been proved to be urban legend

      EDIT: oops, Wombat was quicker than me
      Last edited by Technoid; 4 November 2003, 09:31.
      If there's artificial intelligence, there's bound to be some artificial stupidity.

      Jeremy Clarkson "806 brake horsepower..and that on that limp wrist faerie liquid the Americans call petrol, if you run it on the more explosive jungle juice we have in Europe you'd be getting 850 brake horsepower..."

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      • #4
        C: all of the above...
        pixar
        Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die tomorrow. (James Dean)

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        • #5
          Yup!! but it has certain elements of truth that are funny, particularly the very last sentence.
          Brian (the devil incarnate)

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          • #6
            Still a good read.

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