Watt was successful at convincing a lot of people who ran factories to switch from the current Newcomen steam engine, which was extremely inefficient and used a lot of coal to make a little bit of power. His Watt Steam Engine was a critical driver of the Industrial Revolution. The Scottish Watt invented a viable steam engine by understanding some very complicated thermodynamics, most of which wouldn’t be formalized by scientists for another 100 years. It was proposed by James Watt (the 18th Century Scottish inventor, not the Secretary of the Interior under President Reagan).
(Power is energy divided by time.) Horsepower is actually a unit. Horsepower is how fast the engine delivers energy. As a friend likes to say, horsepower lets you go fast, but torque makes you feel good. We usually talk about horsepower when we talk about engines, but the important quantity here is actually torque.
Moody asked me this a couple weeks ago and I gave him a really crappy answer. To explain this, we have to touch on a couple concepts. I get this question a lot: If NASCAR decreases horsepower for everyone, how does that make it easier to pass? You’re basically taking everyone down by the same amount, right?
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