Re: Technology and historical continuity...
Martin F Krafft said:
> The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is
> derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war
> chariot. And bureaucracies live forever.
Bullshit.
<http://www.scsra.org/library/milspec-debunk.html>:
> So, how did this particular gauge come about? Our friend's
> horseshit tale of it dating back to Roman chariot widths
> may have occasional bits of fact, but the real answer is
> based on _engineering needs of the day_. The standard gauge
> was the widest original width you could reliably make an
> iron axle (pre-bessemerized steel days) that would support
> the then-weight of locomotives. Basic structural engineering
> which I won't go into in detail but which should be easy to
> calculate; there's a basic tradeoff between thickness,
> length, and number of axles in a traintruck that's related
> to weight bearing and stress. Of the several gauges that
> became more widely used in the 1840s and 1850s, what
> eventually became standard gauge was simply the one that was
> in the working tolerance ranges that was most widely used at
> the time.
Also, I don't think this is debian related.
--
Jordan Bettis <http://www.hafd.org/~jordanb>
This message has been written using my webmail system.
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