Newsletter9

Quote of the week:

“'Where there is a will there is a way.' is an old true saying. He who resolves upon doing a thing, by that very resolution often scales the barriers to it, and secures its achievement. To think we are able, is almost to be so. To determine upon attainment is frequently attainment itself.” - Samuel Smiles

(Smiles is best known today as the writer of the book: Self-Help published in 1859)

A story about finding out why some things are done the way they are done, even when it's known not to be the best way:

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 at 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.
The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is the size that it is because it only has to be wide enough to take a train. Trains are made the size that they are because of the distance between the rails.

The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8 ½ inches or 1.435 metres. Why was such an odd number gauge used? Because that's the way they were built in England, and US railroads were built by English experts.
See link.

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.

So why did the Romans make the chariots the width that they did? Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses.

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.

So – some barriers to progress take a lot of breaking down!!! Remember then, when someone is being a horse’s ass, that they can be quite important.

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