Mike Kaliski wrote:

"Lostgallifreyan" wrote in message
. ..
Richard Clark wrote in
:

As the original poster (I presume it was Art) is in the habit of
quoting a German surveyor of the early 19th century; it should have
been settled by the Reichoffice of land boundaries.

These threads seem to be started in the vein of a breathless discovery
of an announcement tucked away in a locked file cabinet in the
janitor's closet in the third basement revealing plans for the "new"
hyper-Hohenzollern horse carriage expressway bypass - as much as the
original comment, responses and counter-responses are so distinctive
by fulfilling that metaphor.


That reminds me of another great bit of writing, on military standards, I
found it online somewhere, it explained how the Roman roads were decided
based on uquestrian travel, went on to show how the same standard measures
persisted through centuries of rail travel and ended up explaining why it
is
that the scale of the solid rocket booster of the most advanced form of
orbital transport known was exactly correlated with the width of a horse's
ass.

Basically true. The ruts on Roman or older roads caused by wagons and carts
meant that any cart not conforming to a standard wheel width would tip over
or lose a wheel. Rail wagons were adapted from road carts and so the
standard was maintained through the Victorian era. Modern machinery is still
essentially set up to those standards to maintain compatibility with earlier
equipment and so that older machinery can still be maintained. Bit like the
DOS prompt still being available in Windows?

Mike G0ULI

"There is an urban legend that Julius Caesar specified a legal width for
chariots at the width of standard gauge, causing road ruts at that width, so
all later wagons had to have the same width or else risk having one set of
wheels suddenly fall into one deep rut but not the other.

In fact, the origins of the standard gauge considerably predate the Roman
Empire, and may even predate the invention of the wheel. The width of
prehistoric vehicles was determined by number of interacting factors which
gave rise to a fairly standard vehicle width of a little under 2 metres
(6.6 ft) These factors have changed little over the millenia, and are still
reflected in today's motor vehicles."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_gauge


--
Jim Pennino

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