Ready for blast off?

Today’s lesson is about the persistence of technology.

Once a standard for technology is set, it is very very very difficult to get rid of it.

Thus, as we enter into an entirely new realm of technology with the web and digital, we should be careful not to infect our new world with remanants from the old.

As we say in the Academies, you have to forget everything you know or you think you know, or old architecture and old ways of working will bleed in, often without your even knowning why or where they came from.

A case in point:

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?Â Because that’s the way they built them

in England and English expatriates designed 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 theyÂ had 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 (including England) for their legions. Those 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).

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.

Special credit- Judy Rosenblum