HORSEPOWER

Care of PJ O'Rourke.
Horsepower is not a quaint leftover of linguistics or a vague metaphoric anachronism. James Watt, father of the steam engine and progenitor of the industrial revolution, lacked a measurement for the movement of weight over distance in time—what we call energy. (What we call energy wasn’t even an intellectual concept in the late 18th century—in case you think the recent collapse of global capitalism was history’s most transformative moment.) Mr. Watt did research using draft animals and found that, under optimal conditions, a dray horse could lift 33,000 pounds one foot off the ground in one minute. Mr. Watt—the eponymous watt not yet existing—called this unit of energy “1 horse-power.”

In 1970 a Pontiac GTO (may the brand name rest in peace) had horsepower to the number of 370. In the time of one minute, for the space of one foot, it could move 12,210,000 pounds. And it could move those pounds down every foot of every mile of all the roads to the ends of the earth for every minute of every hour until the driver nodded off at the wheel. Forty years ago the pimply kid down the block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan, whose hordes went forth to pillage mounted upon less oomph than is in a modern leaf blower.

 

By those metrics, our beloved XJs can move somewhere between 1,600,000 and 3,000,000 pounds!

...or about 150-250 pounds, really friggin fast!!

 

Plus the added advantage of not having to feed and clean up after those 65 horses in the stable.

 

A big Clydesdale can actually exert 15 HP for a short period of time.
The initial testing was something like lifting 400 LB vertically in a well

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine

Here's some of the earliest engines in the world.

 

Damn Professor Wiz, interesting post. Especially the part about Genghis Khan.

Loren

 

I'm diggin' the comparison

I have neither a horse nor a well, so I use (Torque x RPM) / 5252, which coincidentally is the same number of magic gnomes in my engine that make it work.

 

I bow at the feet of the master. Damn, wiz, when are you gonna come america and scare my bike into working?