Horsepower is a term that we’ve all heard in relation to the power of a car, but have you ever wondered what it actually means? Let’s take a look at where the horsepower measurement came from and what it means in terms of power.<\/p>\n
Where did horsepower come from?<\/strong><\/p>\n James Watt was a Scottish inventor and engineer who lived from 1736 – 1819. He became interested in steam engines at an early age and worked on ways to improve their efficiency and power. To help sell his engines, he needed a way to measure the power of an engine in terms that his contemporaries would understand so he conducted a series of experiments with horses and mine ponies to see how much work a horse could do in a minute. His findings led to him defining 1 horsepower as being equal to 33,000 ft*lbf\/min (foot-pounds per minute). 1 horsepower is also equal to 746 W (watts).<\/p>\n How much horsepower can a human achieve?<\/strong><\/p>\n This varies greatly based on the health of the human and whether you are looking at short burst output or output over a period of time. Over a short period of time, a typical human can produce 1.2 hp while an athlete can produce about 2.5 hp. Over longer periods of time (several hours) an athlete can sustain about 0.3 hp while a typical human can sustain 0.1 hp indefinitely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Horsepower is a term that we’ve all heard in relation to the power of a car, but have you ever wondered what it actually means? Let’s take a look at where the horsepower measurement came from and what it means in terms of power. Where did horsepower come from? James Watt was a Scottish inventor … Continue reading “What is Horsepower?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inspectaride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inspectaride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inspectaride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inspectaride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inspectaride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.inspectaride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":417,"href":"https:\/\/www.inspectaride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions\/417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inspectaride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inspectaride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inspectaride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}