Centimeters Per Second to Kilometers Per Hour (cm/s to km/h)

1 centimeter per second equals 0.036 kilometers per hour exactly.

1 centimeter per second = 0.036 kilometers per hour

How to convert centimeters per second to kilometers per hour

To convert centimeters per second to kilometers per hour, multiply the number of centimeters per second by 0.036. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply kilometers per hour by 27.77777778 (rounded).

kilometers per hour = centimeters per second × 0.036

Example: 10 centimeters per second = 0.36 kilometers per hour.

About these units

Centimeter Per Second (cm/s)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One hundredth of a meter per second. Used for slow speeds, such as settling particles.

Centimeter per second once had a formal name of its own. In 1888 a committee on mechanical nomenclature, reporting to the British Association meeting at Bath, proposed the kine for a speed of 1 cm/s, together with the bole for momentum and the barad for pressure. The trade press mocked the set, one journal calling it an abomination, and by 1913 the names had fallen out of use, so the plain compound unit survived instead.

Its natural territory is slow settling and drifting. Stokes' law gives the terminal speed of a small sphere sinking through a fluid, and that speed rises with the square of the particle radius, so fine particles fall far more slowly than coarse ones. One centimeter per second equals 0.01 m/s, or 0.036 km/h, which is a hundred times slower than the walking pace of 1 to 1.5 m/s, and it is 100 cm/s for each meter per second.

1 centimeter per second = 0.01 meters per second (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Kine (unit); Wikipedia: Stokes' law; Wikipedia: Orders of magnitude (speed)

Kilometer Per Hour (km/h)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The standard unit for road speeds in most countries: 1 km/h is about 0.2778 m/s.

Myriameters per hour came first, at least in French. Although the meter was defined in 1799, speeds were initially quoted using the myriameter of 10,000 meters, and the phrase myriamètres par heure appears in 1802. The Dutch adopted the kilometer in 1817 under the name mijl. English abbreviations only appeared in the late nineteenth century, and many competing forms followed, from k. p. h. in 1889 to KMPH in 1940. Reuters and The Economist still prefer kph.

SI treats km/h as a unit symbol, not an abbreviation, and it is the generally preferred form. The European Union required SI usage in 1972, and a 1975 directive requires km/h on speedometers in all languages. In the United States a 1988 NHTSA rule allowed km/h on speedometers. Exactly 3.6 km/h make 1 m/s, one mile per hour is exactly 1.609344 km/h, and one knot is exactly 1.852 km/h. Road signs and speed limits in most of the world use it.

1 kilometer per hour = 0.2777777778 meters per second (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Kilometres per hour; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

Related conversions

See all speed units.