A kingdom for a horse?

-----Original Message-----
From: G
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2000 9:48 AM
To:
Subject: This should be a joke but it's not

HOW MILITARY SPECS LIVE FOREVER

The U.S. 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 the U.S. railroads
were built by English expatriates.

Why did the English people 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 use that odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some
of the old, long-distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel
ruts.

So who built these old rutted roads?

The first long-distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the
benefit of their legions.The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts?

The initial ruts,which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying
their wagons,were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were
made for or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel
spacing.

Thus, we have the answer to the original questions.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from
the original specification (military spec) for an Imperial Roman army war
chariot.

Military specs 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. The Imperial Roman chariots

were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war
horses.

Now the twist to the story..............

When we 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 might 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 had 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 is about as wide as two
horses'
behinds....

Sooo...One of the major design features 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!