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[LeadersWorkshop] Fw: ~~~~~~~~~ A Very Interesting Piece of History


 A Very Interesting Piece of History

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.
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.

Now, the twist to this 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, imagine 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 rear. Ancient horse's rear ends controled almost everything...





These facts are historical, pragmatic and comic.



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Ditulis oleh: Andriansyah -

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