AN INSIDE PERSPECTIVE
Can Y ou Spare Some Change? By Jim Harris, CGCS
C
hange, someone once said, is inevitable, while someone else said that the only thing that doesn’t change is change itself. How many things that affect the economic stability of our country have not changed over the years? A friend of mine had stopped at a railroad crossing and was watching the train roll slowly by. As he sat there, mesmerized by the slowly turning wheels and the sleep-inducing clickkity-clack of the train, he said to his son-in-law, “You know, the design of train tracks hasn’t changed since their inception over a hundred years ago. Why is that?” Several days later, he received an email from his son-in-law about train tracks. He read that the rails on our train tracks are exactly four feet, eight-anda-half inches wide. The document went on to say that the reason for that was
24
because our rail system was designed and built by English immigrants and, in England, their rails were exactly four feet, eight-and-a-half inches wide. Why were the English rails that exact width? Because they were built by the men who had built England’s tramways, which were four feet, eight-and-a-half inches wide. Well, with the answering of each question, a new question arose. Why did they build the tramways that particular width? When they decided to build the tramways, the most qualified people for such a job were the wagon builders who built wagons with axles that were, you guessed it, four feet, eight-and-a-half inches wide. The wagon builders built wagon axles that wide because if they didn’t, the wheels would not fit the ruts in the roads that were — say it with me, here — four feet, eight-and-half-inches
TENNESSEE TURFGRASS AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2005
wide. If the wagon wheels didn’t fit the ruts, then driving over the uneven ruts would break the axle. The ruts in the roads were that width because they were built by the invading Roman armies whose war chariots were that width. Finally, the Roman war chariots were that wide because that was the average width of the span across the rear ends of two horses harnessed side by side. Now an ironic twist to this whole thing is that the booster rockets on the space shuttles were originally designed to be bigger in diameter, but because they were manufactured in Colorado and had to be shipped to Florida by rail, they had to make them narrow enough to fit on a railroad car. This means the technology used to send tons of metal, material and humans into outer space is actually based on the width of
Email TTA at: tnturfgrassassn@aol.com