The Idler, Thursday, August 1, 2019

History's

lessons go

way back

HISTORY is bunk, Henry Ford once famously said. Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it, said fellow-American George Santayana.

A history formulation comes this way.

The US standard railroad gauge is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. (And as this is history, we stick to linear measurement).

Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English engineers designed the first US railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

So, why did they use that gauge? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that same wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

If they tried any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old long distance roads in England. You see, that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome .Those roads have been used ever since.

And what about the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match. Therefore the US 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 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.

When you see a Space Shuttle on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, SRBs.

They are made at a factory in Utah. The engineers would have preferred to make the SRBs a bit fatter, but they had to be taken by train to the launch site. The railroad from the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through. 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 was determined over 2 000 years ago by the width of a horse's ass. Ancient horses' asses still control almost everything and  current horses' asses are controlling everything else.

I think Santayana was right.

 

 

Charity

MORE from Rosemarie Jarski's Great British Wit. Topic: Charity.

·       There are two different kinds of people. There are people who always feel sorry for buskers and put something in their hat and there are those who look into the hat and think:"By gum, I wish I was making that kind of money." – Miles Kington.

·       The fishy glitter in his eye became intensified. He looked like a halibut which had been asked by another halibut to lend it a couple of quid till next Wednesday. – PG Wodehouse.

·       Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall not be disappointed. – Jonathan Swift.

 

 

Tailpiece

HOW does a Russian commit suicide? He smells his armpits.

How does an American commit suicide? He tells this one to a Russian.

 

Last word

 

He hasn't an enemy in the world - but all his friends hate him. - Eddie Cantor

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