what is horsepower, and what does it mean?
The term horsepower was invented by James Watt, who lived way back between 1736 and 1819. The story goes that Watt was working with strong draft horses carrying coal, and he wanted a way to talk about the power available from one of these horses. Probably wanted to brag to his fellows about how he improved his horses’ performance, right ?? He found that, on average, a horse could do 22,000 foot-pounds of work in a minute. For some odd reason, he then multiplied 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, your lawn mower, your chain saw and even in some cases, even your vacuum cleaner. What horsepower means is this… In Watt’s judgment, one horse at the coal mine can do 33,000 foot-pounds of work every minute (apparently those horses he observed doing 22,000 foot-pounds of work every minute were slackers
