What do horse asses, a 1.5 mile tunnel in Staffordshire, the Space Shuttle, and the price of oil all have in common?
I wrote yesterday how the peace of “the post-Cold War order” (as Tony Blair would put it) bred a hubris that will create opportunities for investors.
But I didn’t go into much detail. In this short series I’ll share one of the ways in which investors wedded to the popular attitudes of the 1990s and 2000s will be widowed in the 2020s… and how the market “Casanovas” who have imagination on their side stand to profit handsomely in the process.
(Is it just me, or does anyone else find it strange that we’re about to enter what will be referred to in the future as “the twenties”? Are we allowed to call them the “Roaring Twenties” if they go well, or are there rules against duplicate historical eras..? I digress.)
To set the scene, I’d like to share one of those diamonds in the rough which make Twitter, for all of its flaws, worthwhile. A little over a month ago, one Bill Holohan (@BillHolohanSolr), a lawyer in Ireland, took it upon himself to explain why train tracks are as wide apart as they are, in a Twitter thread which swiftly gained grand proportions:
A history lesson for people who think that history doesn’t matter:
What’s the big deal about railroad tracks?
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used?
Well, because that’s the way they built them in England, and English engineers designed the first US railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.
So, why did ‘they’ use that gauge then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that same wheel spacing.
Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break more often on some of the old, long distance roads in England. You see, that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.
And what about the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or run the risk of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder ‘What horse’s ass came up with this?’, you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses’ asses.)
Now, the twist to the story: When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but they had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.
The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature, of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system, was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass. And you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important?
So, ancient horse’s asses control almost everything and…
CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else.
Now to be clear, several folks have questioned and derided this story as an urban myth. Many Americans pointing out that during the Civil War, several different widths, or “gauges”, of train track were in use, and it was only afterwards when the Unionists won that the North altered the gauges in the South to match their own. However, this doesn’t explain British railways, and from what I can understand the reason George Stephenson went for 4ft 8.5 inches is debatable.
But what do I know – I’m no historian of the ancient world or the origin of locomotives, so I’ve not the credentials to comment on the accuracy of Holohan’s claims (though I admit I am sympathetic to his assertion at the end about “CURRENT Horses Asses”).
The reason I share the tale is because it makes you wonder how vastly different things would have been in the present had things in the past gone differently. Regardless of the Romans, how would history have been different if George Stephenson had made train tracks 5 feet apart rather than 4ft 8.5 inches? How about 4ft 5 inches?
What historical events would still have happened, and which would’ve been entirely different, had the efficiency of all those trains been slightly different?
What do we take for granted which never would have been created if not for seemingly unrelated decisions that were made decades, even centuries before it?
Just as the width of train tracks winds through history and no doubt shaped it to some degree…
Investors today rely on something similar when making assumptions about the future of the global economy. This is something that is vital to its health (or at the very least to the maintenance of the status quo) and yet is rarely acknowledged as a factor – just like the width of train tracks aren’t.
Though it has shaped the global economy in massive ways (that are quite obvious when you look for them), because it’s been there for so many decades it is just being taken for granted, like a piece of scenery which the environment has subtly grown around.
But while it’d be pretty tricky to suddenly change Stephenson’s standard gauge of 4ft 8.5 inches, which makes up 55% of the world’s railway lines, to a different width… this force could actually be changed or drastically reduced in a hurry. And if push comes to shove, there’s not much that many people could do about it.
I haven’t said what it has to do with that 1.5 mile tunnel in Staffordshire and the price of oil yet, but I will tomorrow. Any guesses as to what this force is? Winner gets a bottle of my favourite Belgian beer in the mail: [email protected].
All the best,
Boaz Shoshan
Editor, Capital & Conflict
Category: Market updates