ну если так начинать рассуждать то можно всё абсолютно произвести от Адама. не смог удержаться чтобы не откопипастить
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 ft, 8.5 in. This gauge is used because the English built railroads to that gauge and US railroads were built by English expatriates. Why did the English build railroads to that gauge? 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 those wheelwrights use that gauge then? Because the people who built the horse-drawn trams used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? For the practical reason that any other spacing would break an axle on some of the old, long distance roads, because this is the measure of the old wheel ruts. So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for their legions and used ever since. The initial ruts were first made by Roman war chariots, which were of uniform military issue. The Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses (this example is originally due to Professor Tom O’Hare, Germanic Languages, University of Texas at Austin; email: tohare@ mail.utexas.edu). This story does not end there, however. Look at a NASA Space Shuttle and the 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 at Utah. 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 in Florida. The railroad line from the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains and the SRBs have to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track. So, the major design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse’s ass.
Celko, Joe. Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)