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MINING-HISTORY  February 2010

MINING-HISTORY February 2010

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Subject:

FW: History Lesson

From:

Roger Hutchins <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

The mining-history list.

Date:

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:37:49 +0000

Content-Type:

text/plain

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text/plain (80 lines)

Can anybody verify this ???










 







 




 










 HISTORY LESSON 



Railroad tracks. This is fascinating.




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? Well, 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 then? 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? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break more often 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 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 or run the risk 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.)



Now, the twist to the story: 

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. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything and....




CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else.  



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