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When it comes to engines and automobiles, most of us know one word in particular
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Horsepower. Horsepower. But where does that term come from? And what is a horsepower anyway
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James Watt had invented the steam engine, but was having trouble convincing skeptics to ditch their horses and buggies and buy his product
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He had the brilliant idea to create a formula to prove the efficiency of his invention over the equine
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So Watt had a horse walk in circles to turn a grindstone in a mill. He multiplied the distance the horse walked in one minute by the weight he thought it could pull
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180 pounds. His estimate was shockingly close. Watt then divided by time to find the force and distance per minute
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That number equaled one new unit of measure, which Watt called horsepower
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But that's still pretty vague. What else does one horsepower equal? One burst on a bicycle
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In a flat sprint the average cyclist can eke out one single horsepower Pro can get out about two One coffee maker We measure electricity in watts named after our friend James Watt of course
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746 watts, enough to power a standard-jip coffee maker, equals one horsepower
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And one big pasta party. Heat is another form of energy. One horsepower is equal to 2,545 BTU, or British temperature units
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In a perfect world, where no energy is lost, That's enough to boil 2.2 gallons of room temperature water and cook 14 servings of pasta
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So what's the most horsepower in a single engine? That would be the Wartzilla RT Flex 96C
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It's 44 feet tall, 87 feet long, weighs in at 2,300 tons, and can put out 109,000 horsepower
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No matter how much pasta you eat, you'd never stand a chance in that race
