For Mankind

A few people have asked me to put this video up on YouTube and/or Facebook, so I figured 'what the hell'. This video was my response to a "challenge" laid before us (we, the workers), at an advertising agency I used to work for. I really liked the way the challenge was presented, so I made time to participate in it. I enlisted the help of a buddy of mine to play camera man, and called upon the generous nature of another good friend to loan me his camera for the project. I'm forever grateful to them for their help.

I've pasted the challenge below, so that you can see what I was trying to accomplish with the video... otherwise, if you don't know the challenge, the video loses some of it's context.


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This is e-mail # 1 in what I hope will be a frequent dispatch on the nature of ideas.

What I'm trying to achieve is some kind of regular, thought-provoking "nudge" so that together we can defeat traditional boundaries and pursue the brave new ideas that will drive our client's business and make Y&R and its brand of agencies a real force in Canada. As with all commercial endeavours, there's a reward awaiting some lucky respondent who answers (e-mail me back) the relatively easy question at the end of each dispatch. The prize this week is a $20 gift voucher at Indigo. I hope you find this both stimulating and worthwhile.


Precedence
The first hurdle for all ideas is most often the hurdle of precedence. The notion that we should stick to the tried and true. The habitual. The set solution most acceptable to either ourselves or to our client. It's amazing how much of what we do has been formed through previously set rules and regulations. (See example below). Yet to truly bring something breakthrough to the table, we must learn the courage to set aside our usual traditional measures. It's how to give birth to pure, unfettered new ideas. Ideas that transform a client's business.

True:
The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That is an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and the U.S. railroads were built by English expatriates.

Why did the English build them that way? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did "they" use that gauge? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

So why did the wagons have that particular odd spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that was the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? The ruts in the roads, which 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 derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Specifications and bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horses ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back end of two war horses. Thus we have the answer to the original question.

Now for the twist to the story. When we see a space shuttle sitting on it's launching pad, there are two booster rockets attached to the side of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRB's. The SRB's are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRB's might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory had 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' rumps.

So, a major 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.

Question:
Everyone probably remembers Neil Armstrong as the man who walked on the moon. But who were the two other astronauts that accompanied him on his mission?

The correct answer, expressed by e-mail in the most creative way will win an Indigo Gift Voucher.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Moon Landing
• Neil Armstrong
• Buzz Aldrin
• Michael Collins (astronaut)
• Hundredth Monkey
• Christ Consciousness
• Man on the moon
• Lunar Landing
• Apollo 11
• NASA

[TimothyEttridge]

"Is it because he didn't get out of the damn module?...The dude was on the frickin' moon." Not so. Michael Collins remained in orbit above the moon within the Command Module, with which the upper half of the Lunar Module would later rendezvous before the three headed home together.

[johnnytweed]

@TimothyEttridge

Yeah, I learned that after I made the video. I was surprised to find that out, actually. I guess "They" say "three guys" went to the moon because they consider Collins in orbit as "on the moon". Either way, it only served to impress upon me further the achievements, considering the Eagle had to rendezvous with the Module in orbit. Just blows my mind that they were able to do that.

[TimothyEttridge]

@johnnytweed, I often wonder if the development of the science of orbital mechanics was one of the true achievements of the early space program that is not really recognized by most people. For example, going faster in orbit makes you go UP, not forward. Think of twirling a ball on an elastic string around your head. If you increase the speed, the elastic cord gets stretched. Moving one orbiting spacecraft to another was far more complicated than simply "point, fire, and go."