The story of horse-cart to spacecraft

The original ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by the wheels of Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

So when horse drawn carriages came, it was natural that the rails follows the same size of 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. 

US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? 

Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates.

When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah (Y-oo-t-aa). The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. 

So is it really the Roman who had a hand in the design of Atlantis?

:)