Foot-pound Per Second (ft⋅lbf/s)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

About 1.3558 watts. A horsepower is 550 of these.

1 foot-pound per second = 1.355817948 watts (approximately).

1 foot-pound per second = 1.355817948 watts

About the foot-pound per second

Engineers in the English-speaking world measured work as force times distance, so a pound-force lifted through a foot became a foot-pound, and doing it each second gave the foot-pound per second. It is the base from which horsepower is built, since the imperial horsepower is defined as 550 foot-pounds per second, or 33,000 per minute, the figure fixed by James Watt and Matthew Boulton in 1783.

In SI terms one foot-pound per second is about 1.3558 watts, and NIST lists 1.355818 watts without marking it exact. The reverse is 1 watt equal to 0.7375621 foot-pounds per second. Multiplying 550 by 1.3558 gives about 745.7 watts, the usual value for a mechanical horsepower. The unit is rarely quoted on its own today, though it appears in older mechanics texts and in small-scale power estimates.

Sources: Wikipedia: Horsepower; Wikipedia: Watt; NIST SP 811, Appendix B.8

Foot-pound Per Second conversion chart

1 foot-pound per second expressed in every other power unit:

Unit1 foot-pound per second
Watts1.355817948
Kilowatts0.001355817948
Horsepower0.001818181818
Megawatts0.000001355817948
Gigawatts1.355817948×10⁻⁹
Metric Horsepower0.001843399392
BTU Per Hour4.626242868
Milliwatts1,355.817948
Electrical Horsepower0.001817450333
Tons Of Refrigeration0.000385520239
Kilocalories Per Hour1.166573761
Calories Per Second0.3240482668
Ergs Per Second13,558,179.48
Poncelets0.001382549544

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