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The standard railroad gauge
"The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That is an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England and U.S. railroads were built by English expatriates.
Why did the English build them that way? Because the first railways were built by the same people who built the pre-railway tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
Why did "they" use that gauge? Because the people who built the pre-railroad tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, that used that spacing.
So why did the wagons use that particular spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that was the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by the Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have ever since.
And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots first formed the ruts in the roads, which everyone had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the same manner of wheel spacing.
The U.S. standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Specifications and bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back end of two war horses.
Thus we have the answer to the original question.
When we see the space shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two booster rockets attached to the side of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocker boosters, or SRB's.
The SRB's are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRB's might have preferred to have made them a bit fatter, but the SRB's had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.
The railroad line from the factory had to run trough a tunnel in the mountains. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track and the track is about as wide as two horse's rumps.
So, a major 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!
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