(171.)

When steam-engines were first brought into use, they were commonly applied to work pumps for mills which had been previously worked or driven by horses. In forming their contracts, the first steam-engine builders found themselves called upon to supply engines capable of executing the same work as was previously executed by some certain number of horses. It was therefore convenient, and indeed necessary, to be able to express the performance of these machines by comparison with the animal power to which manufacturers, miners, and others, had been so long accustomed. When an engine, therefore, was capable of performing the same work in a given time as any given number of horses of average strength usually performed, it was said to be an engine of so many horses' power. Steam-engines had been in use for a considerable time before this term had acquired any settled or uniform meaning, and the nominal power of engines was accordingly very arbitrary. At length, however, the use of steam-engines became more extended, and the confusion and inconvenience arising out of all questions respecting the performance of engines, rendered it necessary that some fixed [Pg288] and definite meaning should be assigned to the terms by which the powers of this machine were expressed. To have abandoned the term horse-power, which had been so long in use, would have been obviously inconvenient; nor could there be any objection to its continuance, provided all engine-makers, and all those who used engines, could be brought to agree upon some standard by which the unit of horse-power might be defined. The performance of a horse of average strength working for eight hours a day was therefore selected as a standard, or unit, of steam-engine power. Smeaton estimated that such an animal, so working, was capable of performing a quantity of work equal in its mechanical effect to 22,916 lbs. raised one foot per minute, while Desaguliers estimated the same power at 27,500 lbs. raised through the same height in the same time. The discrepancy between these estimates probably arose from their being made from the performances of different classes of horses. Messrs. Boulton and Watt caused experiments to be made with the strong horses used in the breweries in London, and from the result of these trials they assigned 33,000 lbs. raised one foot per minute, as the value of a horse's power. This is the unit of engine-power now universally adopted; and when an engine is said to be of so many horses' power, what is meant is, that that engine, in good working order and properly managed, is capable of moving a resistance equal to 33,000 lbs. through one foot per minute. Thus an engine of ten horse-power is one that would raise 330,000 lbs. weight one foot per minute.

Whether this estimate of an average horse's power be correct or not, in reference to the actual work which the animal is capable of executing, is a matter of no present importance in its application to steam-power. The steam-engine is no longer used to replace the power of horses, and therefore no contracts are based upon such a comparison. The term horse-power, therefore, as applied to steam-engines, must be understood to have no reference whatever to the actual animal power, but must be taken as a term having no other meaning than the expression of the ability of the [Pg289] machine to move the amount of resistance above mentioned through one foot per minute.