Does it have anything to do with a horse? I read on another sub that one horse at full speed can produce 15 horsepower, how do you divide up a hose to get 1 horse power? Is it horsepower or horse power (you may have noticed I’ve been indecisive and used both)?
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It’s a measure of the work that a horse would average over an 8 hour shift. A horse can do far more at peak capacity, but it can’t sustain that level of effort for very long.
Horsepower was originated because horses were used for mechanical labor (like lifting loads) so if one is attempting to sell an engine to a company using horse’s power to do a job, the appropriate engine could be found or made to replace a team of 4 horses.
In the early days of steam/internal combustion machinery inventors and salesmen struggled to explain the difference in power output of their devices, and so the industry developed the “horsepower” unit.
It is based on the average power output of a draft horse working at a sustainable pace – not a horse’s peak, or even a human’s peak.
That means that a 1hp engine is the towing equivalent to what you’re used to reasonably expecting from the kind of lazy old horse most people had experience with.
It’s just another way of saying 745 watts of power. It was originally measured by a horse lifting 250kg of water. When referring to this measurement, it’s horsepower. When referring to the actual power of a horse, I suppose you could use two words.
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