[NMLUG] [Fwd: A Tribute to Engineering and a Horse's Rump]

[Don at Silver-Lynx.com (Don Wilde)]

specifications

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: A Tribute to Engineering and a Horse's Rump
Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 15:29:04 -0700
From: Brian Christian <bchristi@unm.edu>
Organization: UNM OVPR
To: undisclosed-recipients:;


Why is the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters the size they are? Read
on .....

A Tribute to Great Engineers.

Good Engineering Lasts Forever, take for example:  The U.S.standard
railroad gauge (distance between the rails).

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 build them that way?

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?

Because they people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools
that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

So why did the wagons have that particular odd 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
was the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?

The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by
Imperial Rome for their legions.  The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads?

The ruts in the roads, which everyone had to match for fear of
destroying their wagon wheels, were first formed by Roman war chariots.

Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all
alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

The U.S. standard railroad gauge of 4 feet 8.5 inches derives from the
original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

Specifications and bureaucracies live forever.  So the next time you
are  handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it,
you  maybe be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots
were  made just wide enough to accommodate the back end of two war horses.

Thus we have the answer to the original question.

Now for the twist to the story.

When we see a space shuttle sitting on its launching pad, there are two
booster rockets attached to the side of the main fuel tank.  These are
solid rocket boosters, or SRB's.  The SRB's are made by Thiokol at
their  factory in Utah.  The engineers who designed the SRB's might
have  preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's 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 tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad
track is about as wide as two horses' rumps.  So, a major 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!

Don't you just love engineering?



-- 
Don Wilde  ---------> Silver Lynx <----------
  Raising the Trajectory of Human Development
---------------------------------------------
          http://www.Silver-Lynx.com