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James Watt...Horse Power's Origins
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Posted by Woody on January 13, 1999 at 06:11:02:
A while back here at YT, questions were asked as to where HP calculations originated. At the time, I had remembered reading somewhere about HP being tied to the weight a horse could lift and today in my mail I received a society newsletter with a short article on this issue and thought I would pass it along:
"Engineer James Watt (1736-1819) was working with draft horses carrying coal and wanted a way to quantify the power available from one of these horses. He found that an average horse could do 22,000 foot-pounds of work in a minute. for some odd reason, he increased that number by 50% and pegged the measurement of horsepower at 33,000 foot-pounds of work in one minute. Therefore, according to Watt, 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 munute. For auto's, [tractors as well?] horsepower is just an indirect figure calculated from measuring torque on an engine cell dynamometer. HP = torque x rpm / 5252".
As Mr. Harvey would say, '...and that's the rest of the story.' Isn't science wonderful?
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