Horsepower, a term that gets used quite a bit, especially in the automobile industry. Chances are you have heard this term before, perhaps many times, we can all agree that this term is meant to express how powerful a vehicle's engine is but, do you know what this word means?
During the late 18th century the steam engine was revolutionizing the world, changing the way we do everything by connecting the world in a way that it had never before experienced. Trying to devise a way to express to people how much work these engines were capable of was a Scottish inventor, chemist and mechanical engineer, James Watt.
Watt observed ponies hauling coal from a mine and came upon a way to express how much power steam engines could produce and in a way that was easily interpreted by the people of the time. A unit of horsepower is the force generated by one horse pulling 330lbs at a speed of 100ft in one minute.
To learn more about horsepower and how it works within our vehicles, come on over to Jim Manning Dodge Chrysler Jeep Ram today.