Perhaps Ox Power?

Horses really are quite beautiful, and powerful, animals. Whenever I get near one I can just imagine the destructive force that thing could deliver. And it seems to follow naturally that it occurred to someone thousands of years ago, that you could ride one. Horses have been tremendously useful and quite influential in our history. Imagine battles without cavalry, cowboys and Indians without horses, and let's not forget about Incitatus, the first horse to be considered a Roman Consul. At least we hope he was the first horse for that, and the last for that matter.

But there's one thing that sticks out that seems a bit odd to me. Do we really have to measure how powerful our engines are in horsepower? Isn't that just a bit redundant? I could see how back in the day it was relevant. I could see a car salesman saying, "Yeah, you got yerself a horse alright, but how about 22 horses? Ya got that? This thingamabob is equal to 22 horses, and ya don't even need to feed it!" Great sales pitch. If this was 1910.

But it is now 2010 (almost 2011). My Honda Civic has 198 horsepower. I'm really glad to know that if I strapped nearly 200 horses to the front of my car, I could save on gas and go just as fast. I hope people are beginning to see what I'm getting at. It's a useless measurement, and yet we keep using it. And it is so prevalent. Even NASA scientists still use it. Do we really need to know that the main engines of the space shuttle had 37 million horsepower? Has anyone ever seen 37 million horses at one time? What does this prove? I guess I can imagine strapping 37 million horses into a giant rubber band so I could go to space, but that's a lot of truck fulls of hay, not to mention all the horseshit. My launchpad would consist of nothing but manure. The sheer mechanics of all this is mind boggling. So why do we do it? Isn't there some other system we could come up with? How about Model T's? Or my car? Can't we just take 200 horsepower and call it 1 Car? It's a pretty even ratio. Not too hard to figure out. Easier than converting miles to kilometers.

Thingamabob is actually a word?