Imagine you have a large socket wrench with a two-foot handle. Torque is easiest to explain through an example. Engineers also did calculations to relate horsepower to torque, which is especially important for boat engines.
In other words, if you put a one-horsepower horse on a treadmill, it would be able to operate a generator producing 746 watts. For example, other experiments determined one horsepower equals 746 watts of energy. The measurement of horsepower was converted into other units of measurement.
The relevance of horsepower, the measurement of 550 foot-pounds per second, didn’t stop with the Industrial Revolution. Comparing the power of a horse to the power of a steam engine showed Watt’s steam engine could do the work of five horses, and it went on to become an integral part of the Industrial Revolution. However, Watt didn’t let that fact bother him, and it didn’t bother his customers, either. There were a few flaws with this new measurement - the biggest being the assumption that a horse could continue to work at that consistent rate instead of tiring out. Therefore, he defined one horsepower as 33,000 foot-pounds of work per minute - or 550 foot-pounds per second. Through his experiments, he determined one horse could do about 33,000 foot-pounds of work in one minute - meaning a horse could lift a 33,000-pound weight one foot in one minute. To market his new product to this audience, Watt knew he had to come up with a way to compare the work of horses to the work of his invention. Unfortunately, comparing the steam engine to the Newcomen engine wasn’t effective marketing, as most of the population was still using horses for mechanical work. This new steam engine could do the same amount of work as the former Newcomen engine, but used only one-quarter of the fuel. In the late 1700s, a Scottish engineer named James Watt invented the first steam engine, which improved on a design pioneered by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Today, it applies to boat and auto engines, but its original use was to describe the power of a steam engine.
Horsepower is defined as a unit of power equal to 550 foot-pounds per second used to measure the power of an engine.
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