To sell his engines to people more familiar with horses, he calculated the standard amount of work that a horse can do in a second and told his potential customers that his engine could take the place of that many animals. James Watt, the 18th-century inventor of a new steam engine and the namesake for watt as a measurement of power, is responsible for the horse comparison. ![]() You might not be familiar with how much power a horse has, but it was an effective measurement in the early days of cars. That’s how we ended up with the term horsepower to measure the power of engines and motors, which is a unit of power equal to 550 foot-pounds per second, or 745.7 watts. There are no horses in cars, but one common metric to measure what a vehicle is capable of is to measure it by what a standard horse would be capable of (and this goes for both racecars and the car in your driveway).
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