The Worst Enemy of Progress: Standards? (3/5)
In the previous two articles on progress I might have made the impression that counter-intuitively, to achieve actual progress, older might be better. Is that so? Let’s look at an extreme example of this — a fairly well-known and often re-circulated story that “space shuttle booster’s width is two horse asses plus X”. (Or, here is a short version with pictures, in Tweet form, if you prefer Twitter.) Which, by extension, would mean that the newest addition to NASA’s fleet, the Space Launch System (SLS), is related to a 2000 year old roman horse’s ass, by the fact that it is using an extended version of the said Space Shuttle’s SRBs.
While the conclusion seems to be that this is an urban legend, and the Space Shuttle might not have any relation to a horse’s ass whatsoever, the basic story (bar the newer, Usenet-based addition with the Space Shuttle) is sound: the width of the railroad track is based on the dimensions of two horse rears, same as the chariot width in the old Rome. It is even affirmed in the same article that posits the story is not true:
[…]the dimension common to both was that of a cart axle pulled by two horses in harness (about 1.4m or 4ft 8in). This determined both the Roman gauge and Stephenson’s, which derived from the horsedrawn wagon ways of South Northumberland and County Durham coalfields.[…]
[from: Crow, James. Housesteads. London: B.T. Batsford, 1995. ISBN 0–7134–6085–7 (pp. 33–34).]
The same article also says:
At the time of the Civil War, even though nearly all of the Confederacy’s railroad equipment had come from the North or from Britain (of the 470 locomotives built in the U.S. in 1860, for example, only 19 were manufactured in the South), 113 different railroad companies in the Confederacy operated on three different gauges of track. This lack of standardization was, as historian James McPherson points out, one of the many reasons the Union was able to finally vanquish the Confederacy militarily:
The Confederate government was never able to coax the fragmented, run-down, multi-gauged network of southern railroads into the same degree of efficiency exhibited by northern roads. This contrast illustrated another dimension of Union logistical superiority that helped the North eventually to prevail.
[from: McPherson…
