The following comment was made in 1897 and recorded by the folk at Oxford Dictionaries:
"The term 'horse-power' has probably seen its best days"
This was optimistic, at best, and I had to struggle with it in 'O' level physics in the 1960s when 1 HP was 550 foot-pounds / sec – it still is, of course. But HP persists with, for example, modern UK car brochures and reviews using brake horse-power as an idea, even though it is now neither intuitive nor really meaningful. Meanwhile, the SI unit of power, the Watt, is completely a-intuitive.
All this is in my mind because I'm reading Andreas Malm's Fossil Capital, where the idea of power, both mechanical and socio-economic, are key (and intertwined) ideas.
When the idea of horsepower was first set out it was very intuitive as, in the late 1790s / early 1800s the sight of horses doing work was still a commonplace, and so the idea of comparing the power of a new-fangled engine to what a horse could do had appeal to James Watt, especially as his (and matthew Boulton's) improved engines were much better than horses in almost every sense. The one sense in which they were not an improvement was that they needed coal as fuel (as opposed to oats) and that Faustian pact (says Malm) is when our current problems with global warming began.
Malm makes much of the fact that, in English, the same word (power) does for the mechanical and the socio-economic, whereas in some other key European languages, that is not the case. But is there too much to be made of this, I wonder, as it seems clear that a mechanical sense was there from the 15th century in the English language as the word emerged from the old French 'to be able to', and long before fossil fuels were dreamed of.
Malm writes,
:... fossil fuels ... are, by definition, a materialisation of social relations. No piece of coal or drop of oil has yet turned itself into fuel, and no humans have yet engaged in systematic large-scale extraction of either to satisfy subsistence needs: fossil fuels necessitate waged or forced labour – the power of some to direct the labour of others – as conditions of their very existence. ... The process is peopled [and] workers are the primary interface between society and nature, wielding and subject to power. That is the sphere where the fossil economy must have originated."
More on all this soon.
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