Correspondence.

Time-Binding Bound Too Tightly?

A rough description of time-binding: "A given generation of humankind has the potential to start where the previous generation left off."

I received the following piece from a former colleague, Professor Karla Foss, indicating when the "bindings" might be a little too tight.

  The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is four
  feet, eight-and-a-half inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

  Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in
  England, and the U. S. railroads were built by English expatriates.

  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. Thus we have the answer
  to the original question. The United States standard railroad gauge of
  four feet eight-and-a-half inches derives from the original
  specifications for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Specs and
  bureaucrats 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 chariots were made to be
  just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.

  Now the twist to the story....

  There's an interesting extension of the story about railroad gauge and
  horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch
  pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the
  main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs
  are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed
  the SRBs might 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 to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains.
  The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The size of the tunnel was
  determined by the width of the railroad track that ran through it, and
  the railroad track, as we now know, is about as wide as two horse's
  behinds.

  So a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most
  advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a
  horse's ass!

Like every other potential shared by humankind, we have to apply the time-binding potential with some care. It doesn't automatically work for the best, and it doesn't come "for free."

DAVID LINWOOD, KNOXVILLE, JANUARY 2007