Watts to Foot-pounds Per Second (W to ft⋅lbf/s)
1 watt equals 0.7375621493 foot-pounds per second (rounded).
How to convert watts to foot-pounds per second
To convert watts to foot-pounds per second, multiply the number of watts by 0.7375621493. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply foot-pounds per second by 1.355817948 (rounded).
foot-pounds per second = watts × 0.7375621493
Example: 10 watts = 7.375621493 foot-pounds per second.
Several different horsepower units exist. This site lists mechanical (745.7 W), metric (735.5 W) and electrical (746 W) horsepower separately.
About these units
Watt (W)
The SI unit of power: one joule per second. A typical LED bulb uses 5–10 W and a laptop 30–60 W.
Credit for the name goes to C. William Siemens, who proposed it in August 1882 in his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He chose it to honor James Watt, the Scottish inventor who in 1776 improved the Newcomen steam engine. An International Conference on Electric Units and Standards adopted Siemens' definition in London in October 1908 as the international watt. After the 1948 General Conference on Weights and Measures the unit was redefined in absolute terms, and in 1960 the 11th General Conference adopted it into the SI as the unit of power.
Today one watt is one joule per second, or equivalently one volt times one ampere. Orders-of-magnitude tables put an LED light bulb at about 7 W and an adult's basal metabolic rate at roughly 100 W. A 100 kg person climbing a 3 m ladder in 5 seconds works at about 600 W, while a laborer can sustain around 75 W over an eight-hour day. The watt measures a rate, so it says how fast energy is being used, not how much has been used in total.
The watt is the reference unit for power on this site.
Sources: Wikipedia: Watt; Wikipedia: Orders of magnitude (power)
Foot-pound Per Second (ft⋅lbf/s)
About 1.3558 watts. A horsepower is 550 of these.
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.
1 foot-pound per second = 1.355817948 watts (approximately).
Sources: Wikipedia: Horsepower; Wikipedia: Watt; NIST SP 811, Appendix B.8
Related conversions
- Foot-pounds per second to watts (reverse)
- Watts to kilowatts
- Watts to horsepower
- Watts to megawatts
- Watts to gigawatts
- Watts to metric horsepower
- Watts to BTU per hour
- Watts to milliwatts
- Watts to electrical horsepower
- Watts to tons of refrigeration
- Watts to kilocalories per hour
- Watts to calories per second
- Watts to ergs per second
- Kilowatts to foot-pounds per second
- Horsepower to foot-pounds per second
See all power units.