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Comment by air7 | Hacker News Reader

This backwards compatibility chain reminds me of the age old tale of how rockets are the width of two horses... (1)

(1) http://astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html

This is a classic joke, but settling on a common gauge was really difficult, it was not just copying some old Roman standard. There were even riots when different railways started to standardize because common rail gauge meant you can move through the town without engaging with the local economy, see Erie gauge war. Russia still has a wider gauge than Europe and Australia has 3 different ones.

I've come across an apocryphal tale in the U.S. west describing why certain towns and cities have main streets that are the width required to fully turn a wagon pulled by x number of horses.

Likewise, in the Canadian House Of Parliament, the width between the Prime Minister's desk and that of the Leader Of The Opposition is said to be that of two swords raised, tip to tip, based on the British House Of Commons tradition that they must remain ''two swords and one inch apart.''

Even today size of streets in many cities is determined by the space needed to either turn a fire truck or have two fire trucks pass.

I rode a train in Spain where the train changed gauge at a station!

Spain has a peculiar train gauge. When you cross the border with France, the train slows down and gauge change happens on the fly.

They also have to change sides: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/29i4hq/side_where_...

Thanks for the anecdote that was interesting. I think the Erie gauge war demonstrates that people feel entitled to any advantage of circumstances that they have profited from in the past as if such were their property even when the actual matter are issue is in fact others property.

I've seen this happen with planned bypasses of small towns, either through individuals fighting CPOs for their land, or people in the town opposing planning permission notices. (there's a few I can think of where the council's current plan involves waiting for certain people to die, since that's less effort overall)

Usually such bypasses are great for these towns, as it removes most of the articulated road shipping that needs to pass through there, and generally makes it a nicer place to be.

It depends on the town, it can also kill or relocate it. The town in Pixar's Cars is realistically depicted in that way.

This is precisely what large companies in the US do, they gain an advantage, then when the advantage is threatened, they use every tool at their disposal, including political lobbying, to keep their advantage.

This is done under the guise of preserving shareholder value.

The Romans did not use war chariots, since they are basically useless in combat. They only used chariots for sports in the hippodrome.

Chariots are not “useless in combat”, but they are very expensive to field and only work in pretty narrow circumstances: wide, open, and relatively solid areas (aka not bogs).

These circumstances were not a thing for Roman legions until they reached spain at least, possibly North Africa and the Middle East. As a result they were not part of Roman war doctrines.

On the other hand they were very much part of bronze-age Egyptian and Hittite armies.

An other factor to their lack of appeal tho may have been improvements in horse riding technique and gear, as well as training. Riders can also be heavily armed, but have less travel restriction, and you can field a warrior per horse rather than need two horses and a driver per.

Spain is mountainous as hell; a chariout outside the Castille plains and Madrid would be scrap.

Get a height map of Spain and you can obviously see that a chariot trying to ride at Picos de Europa would be a nightmare.

They used chariots not only in the hippodrome, also for processions and other "shows".

But Roman warfare was a no-nonsense kind of affair, so no chariots. https://acoup.blog describes this really well.

The chariots in this example were more for transport and logistics, not battle.

I would love to know who fabricated this myth and decided to just tell the story as if it were fact.

This is pure gold. Thanks, you made my day! :-)

Also, you might be interested in this: https://youtu.be/1NqRbBvujHY?t=2236

While I enjoyed rewatching the latter half of episode 2 of season 1 of James Burke's Connections tv series, I don't see how the invention of the cloud chamber (which you start the video at) is relevant to standards for rail, horses, or rockets. What's the connection ?

It's a dumb joke with no basis in fact.

Similar reason why many telescope mirrors are exactly 8m across.

People actually still think this dumb joke is true?

Well, there is no real way to disprove it and there is no solid proof where it actually came from.

tale it is

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/railroad-gauge-chariots/

Kind of a garbage article because coincidence or not they are similar widths.

It being a coincidence versus causal is entirely what makes it interesting or not

Snopes is not a good reference to cite, they have changed many artlcles based on research they missed. They tend to just want to get a page up when a topic is popular, then research it later.

I mean, correcting factual errors is pretty good trait for a fact-checking site, right?

Yes, but surely you would do that first?

That's assuming that new facts never come to light over time.

hahaha, that's great. thanks for sharing

That was fun.

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