Centimeters Per Second to Knots (cm/s to kn)

1 centimeter per second equals 0.01943844492 knots (rounded).

1 centimeter per second = 0.01943844492 knots

How to convert centimeters per second to knots

To convert centimeters per second to knots, multiply the number of centimeters per second by 0.01943844492. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply knots by 51.44444444 (rounded).

knots = centimeters per second × 0.01943844492

Example: 10 centimeters per second = 0.1943844492 knots.

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)

Knot (kn)

NauticalCurrent unit

One nautical mile per hour, exactly 1.852 km/h. The unit of speed for ships, aircraft and wind.

Knots in a rope really were counted. Before the mid-nineteenth century, sailors threw a weighted wooden board, the chip, off the stern on a line called the log-line. The line carried knots at regular intervals, and a sailor counted how many passed through his fingers while another timed the run with a sandglass. William Bourne's A Regiment for the Sea, printed in 1574, is the first known description, and many ships spaced knots 8 fathoms, about 14.6 meters, apart with a glass of roughly half a minute.

Today a knot is one nautical mile per hour, exactly 1,852 meters per hour, about 1.151 mph or 0.514 m/s. A ship making 1 knot along a meridian covers about one minute of latitude per hour, which is why charts and the unit fit together. It is not an SI unit, and the symbol is kn, though kt is common in aviation. Saying knots per hour is wrong, since that would describe acceleration. The US moved civil aircraft standards to nautical miles and knots in 1969, and winds and currents are also quoted in them.

1 knot = 0.5144444444 meters per second (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Knot (unit); Wikipedia: Chip log; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

Related conversions

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