Where Some Things Came From

Interesting phrases,  and the debunking of an internet myth with the even stranger truth.  This is not an April Fool’s joke!

Where did the standard railroad gauge (spacing between rail heads) come from?

As for standard railroad track gauge,  you have to understand where that came from.  4 ft 8.5 inches = 1.435 m between rail heads is not a nice round number in anybody's measuring-units system.  

The first rail carriages were made in Europe from road wagons,  the wheels of which fitted the worn ruts in the roads,  with that road rut spacing.  The roads were rutted to the same width all over Europe.  One has to wonder why?  

That rut spacing matched exactly the rut spacing in the old Roman roads made of stone.  Ruts worn there by the passage of Roman iron-rimmed chariot wheels.  And the Romans ruled most of Europe for a long time.  That's why. 

Roman chariot wheels were spaced just far enough apart that the two horses that drew them,  would not trip and stumble in those ruts.  That rut spacing was quite literally set by (the width of) two horse's asses!

Which just goes to show that the evil/stupidity that men do lives long after them.

Where did the saying “son of a gun” come from?

This is about 3 or 4 centuries old,  coming from the voyages of colonization from Europe to the “new World” and Australia.  In those days,  ships were much slower,  and even crossing the Atlantic took multiple months.

Conditions aboard these ships were rather squalid,  and with not much to do,  many of the women turned up pregnant.  Under such conditions,  many of them would not say who the father was. 

Medicine being what it was during those centuries (about 1 step removed from being witch doctors),  about 10% or more of these women would die in childbirth,  and a lot more than that would be having very serious troubles giving birth. 

As a last resort,  the ship’s doctor would have the woman dragged up to the gun deck and placed between two of the ship’s guns.  They would fire one,  in an effort to scare the baby out of her.

If it worked,  the baby was known as a son of a gun.

Where did the saying “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” come from?

Despite the image this conjures up,  the saying has nothing to do with monkeys or genitalia.  It comes from the days of wind driven ships and smooth-bore cannons,  around 2-3 centuries ago.    In those days,  iron was expensive and brass was cheap,  unlike today. 

Cannon balls had to be made of expensive iron,  but being spheres,  rolled all over pitching decks.  They had to be restrained from that.  The solution was a triangular frame resembling the rack that positions billiard balls today,  into which the cannon balls could be stacked in a stable 3-sided pyramidal shape. 

Naval terminology being unlike language anywhere else on Earth,  this rack was called a “monkey”,  and it was made of inexpensive brass.  That’s where the term “brass monkey” derives.  But there’s more …

About 2 centuries ago,  when these old sailing ships ventured into the Arctic and the Antarctic,  they encountered colder temperatures than anybody in the home countries had ever experienced before.  Brass has a larger coefficient of thermal expansion than cast iron,  so the “monkey” (rack) shrank in the cold faster than the cannon balls did.

Cold enough,  and the shrinking rack would squeeze the stack of cannon balls too hard,  causing some of them to suddenly pop loose from the stack,  and go rolling around on the deck.  Such cold weather was deemed literally “cold enough to freeze the balls off the brass monkey”.

Where did the phrase “the whole nine yards” come from?

During World War 1,  the British Royal Flying Corps installed a type of belt-fed machine gun on some of its biplane fighter planes.  This particular gun design used an ammunition belt that was 27 feet (9 yards) long.  Returning pilots who had used up all their ammunition had literally shot “the whole nine yards”.

Which rocket was really designed by the size of a railway tunnel?

Contrary to claims often made on the internet and social media,  the rocket designed by the size of railway tunnels was not the Space Shuttle solid boosters,  it was Werner Von Braun’s V-2 missile in Germany during World War 2.

The Association of American Railroads (AAR) has a specification for the dimensions of rail cars that will fit through any bridges,  tunnels ,  and around mountainside curves,  meant for standard gauge track.  The details of this are given in AAR Plate B “equipment clearance diagram” in detail,  but suffice it to say here that the max overall width is 10 feet 8 inches,  and the max height above the rail heads is 15 feet 1 inch.

The Space Shuttle booster rocket segments were 120 inch (10 feet) outside diameter.  They would fit as segments just fine,  shipped on a railroad flat car,  through any tunnels,  bridges,  or mountainous curves,  anywhere in the US.  That was not the rocket “sized to fit railway tunnels”!  It was sized by other design considerations,  including then-available propellant mix and cast capabilities,  at what was once Thiokol in Salt Lake City,  Utah.

The V-2 was manufactured at a facility known as the “Mittlewerk”,  using concentration camp slave labor,  in the mountains of Bavaria in southern Germany,  during World War 2.  In Germany at that time,  although the same gauge track as in the US,  railway tunnel clearances were tighter than AAR Plate B,  and the entire weapon had to fit upon a standard German flat car of that time (as well as a roadable trailer),  and go through railway tunnels in the Bavarian mountains. 

That fit through a tunnel on a railroad flat car is why the V-2 was limited to 45 feet 11 inches long,  and had the odd-shaped,  short-span,  long-chord fins that it had.  It rode in the X-configuration on those flat cars.  Body diameter was 5 feet 5 inch,  and the wingspan of the fins tip-to-tip was 11 feet 8 inches.  In the X-configuration,  those fins fit within a square box 8 feet 3 inches on a side.

Source:  Wikipedia,  “V-2 Rocket”,  as of 3-31-2024