If you’ve ever gone shopping for a new car or lawnmower, you’ve already been confronted with the question of what horsepower is. Like many terms that have been totally taken over by commercials and advertising, the term horsepower is usually thrown around by salespeople that are trying to push a high-powered and expensive product. When most people hear the term horsepower they usually think that the product they are examining is very powerful and able to handle any task, but they never stop to really think about what this horsepower is.
If you’ve found yourself listening to a car or truck commercial and wondering what is horsepower, you should know that you’re not alone. If you ask the average person on the street this question, they will probably tell you that they think it is the equivalent of the work that can be accomplished by one horse. While this is the answer that conjures up the most traditional image of horsepower, it is not the complete answer. The power of a car’s engine is not measured in how many horses is would take to produce the same amount of power, although energy has a lot to do with the actual answer.
In fact, learning what is horsepower does have its origins steeped in an industry that used to depend on horses and ponies to keep it moving. James Watt, the same person that would lend his name to the units of power that are used to classify light bulbs, used to work in the mining industry, and he used ponies and horses to pull the black gold up from the ground where it could be used for fuel for trains and homes. Watt was searching for a name that he could apply to the amount of work or power that could be expected from one of these mining animals.
Watt discovered that an average mining pony could lift about twenty two thousand foot pounds of coal in one minute. After adjusting these figures a little bit to account for the increased work ability of a full sized horse, Watt answered the question of what is horsepower by estimating that it was the amount of power needed to complete thirty three thousand foot-pounds of work in one single minute. Over the years, the definition has changed a little bit, but it still refers to the amount of power or work that can be accomplished by your car, lawn mower or even vacuum.
– Professional Power Tool Guide
