[Air-l] public domain?

[Ed Lamoureux]

I suspect that most of you will recognize the narrative I'm going to paste
in, below. I nabbed it off the web (someplace long forgotten)...and have
seen it in a variety of forms over the years.

I'd like to print/us it in a book. Problem is, I don't know who/what to
cite . . . or if I even need to cite anyone. At this point, I'm treating
it as an "Internet Urban Legend" . . . 

1) is it?
or
2) do you know its source/owner?

thanks folks
***

There are two booster rockets attached to the side of the main fuel tank
on the space shuttles. These solid rocket boosters (SRBs) are made by
Morton Thiokol at their factory in Utah. They are the width they are
because they have to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch
site. The railroad line from the factory has to run through a tunnel in
the mountains. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and
the railroad track is about as wide as two horses behinds. 
The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet,
8.5 inches. Thats the way they built them in England, and the
U.S. railroads were largely designed and built by English expatriates, who
had also built the pre-railroad tramways. The tramways were the same gauge
because the jigs and tools that were used for building wagons had the same
wheel spacing as the tramways  any other spacing caused the wagon wheels
to break on some of the old, long distance roads in England  that spacing
matches the spacing of long-standing wheel ruts. 
The ruts were there because the first long distance roads in Europe (and
England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The ruts in the
roads, that everyone had to match for fear of destroying their wagon
wheels, were first formed by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were
made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel
spacing.
The U.S. standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches, then, derives from
the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot. The Imperial
Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends
of two war horses, or later, the rough width of two space shuttle SRBs.


Edward Lee Lamoureux, Ph. D.
Associate Professor, 
Speech Communication and Multimedia
Editor, Journal of Communication and Religion
Bradley University
Peoria IL 61625
ell at bradley.edu
http://hilltop.bradley.edu/~ell
Fax: 309-677-3446