What horse is classed as 1 Horse power?

Question

I was driving past 3 Shetland Ponies and said thats 3 horse power but a shire horse is bigger and stronger and if there were 3 of them it would still be 3 horse power. Where is the line drawn?

Answer 1

In truth, the average horse only puts out HALF a horsepower!

It harks back to the days of horse drawn carriages... when a buggy, usually drawn by two horses was classified as "horse-powered".

At the time, there used to be no standard value to each unit of measurement; for example, a 'stone' was simply a rock that each village used as their main base unit of measurement. The weight of a stone could vary from village to village though...

It was the same thing with horsepower. It varied from horse to horse, until whatever governing body was responsible stepped in and said "okay, from now on, a horse power is X amount".

Answer 2

The term horsepower comes from a term that James Watt, (1736-1819)

he was working with mine ponies and he wanted to find a way to

talk about the power available from one of the ponies. He found that they could lift 22,000 foot-pounds in one minute, he added 50% and came up with 33,000 foot pounds ( one horsepower)

Your answer, the horse in horsepower is a mine pony ( a small pony that were used in the coal mines )

Answer 3

Its just an average amount of work any horse can do.

Answer 4

Horsepower no longer even refers exactly to horses. It is a units of measurement now and I doubt anyone knows if it is based on any one kind of horse (and even then there are strong horses, weak horses, etc.)

Answer 5

One Horsepower has been standardized to equal 745.7 Watts, or 33,000 foot-pounds per minute of work.

Answer 6

horse power was used to give people a comparison between newly invented engines & what they were use to (horses did the work)..  so inventers said this engine can do as much work as 2 horses...( 2horse power)...But they over stated the work the engine could do to make it sound better...so now 1 horse power is less than the work a horse can do....

Answer 7

The term horsepower was invented by the engineer James Watt in 1782. Watt lived from 1736 to 1819 and is most famous for his work on improving the performance of steam engines.

Watt was working with ponies lifting coal at a coal mine, and he wanted a way to talk about the power available from one of these animals. He found that, on average, a mine pony could do 22,000-foot-pounds (lift a bucket of coal weighing 22,000 lbs a distance of 1-foot) of work in a minute. He then increased that number by 50 percent and fixed the measurement of horsepower at 33,000-foot-pounds of work in one minute.

Under this system, one horsepower is defined as:

1 hp = 33,000 ft·pound-force·min−1 = exactly 745.69987158227022 W

Answer 8

Horsepower is now an exact measurement, not simply how much a horse can pull. In the same way hands are now exactly 4 inches, not simply the width of your hand. I think 1 horsepower is about 745 watts

A large draft can produce 2 horsepower (odd isn't it). Shetlands are very strong for their size, and are the right build for pulling. I won't be surprised if they really were producing close to 3 horsepower.