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| Know Your Car : The Horsepower Concept |
If you are alive and breathing in the world today, you have heard about horsepower. Just about every car ad mentions it and people talking about their cars bandy the word about. But what is horsepower, and what does it mean?
The Definition
The term horsepower was invented by the engineer James Watt (1736 - 1819) who is most famous for his work on improving the performance of steam engines.
The story goes that Watt was working with ponies lifting coal at a coal mine, and he wanted a way to talk about the power available from one of these animals. He found that on average, a mine pony could do 22,000 foot-pounds of work in a minute. He then increased that number by 50% and pegged the measurement of horsepower at 33,000 foot-pounds of work in one minute. It is that strange, arbitrary unit of measure that has made its way down through the centuries and now appears on your car.
In Watt's judgement, one horse can do 33,000 foot-pounds of work every minute. Imagine a horse raising coal out of a coal mine. A horse exerting one horsepower can raise 330 pounds of coal 100 feet in a minute, or 33 pounds of coal 1000 feet in one minute, or 1,000 pounds 33 feet in one minute, etc. You can make up whatever combination of feet and pounds you like - as long as the product is 33,000 in one minute and you have a horsepower.
Horsepower can be converted into other units. For example, one horsepower is equivalent to 746 watts or 2,545 BTUs (British Thermal Units) per hour. So if you took a one-horsepower horse and put it on a treadmill, it could operate a generator producing a continuous 746 watts. If you took that 746 watts and ran it through an electric heater, it would produce 2,545 BTUs in an hour (where a BTU is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one pound of water one degree F).
One BTU is equal to 1,055 joules, or 252 gram-calories, or 0.252 food Calories. Presumably the horse would burn 641 Calories in one hour doing its work if it were 100% efficient.
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