Centimeters Per Second to Meters Per Second (cm/s to m/s)

1 centimeter per second equals 0.01 meters per second exactly.

1 centimeter per second = 0.01 meters per second

How to convert centimeters per second to meters per second

To convert centimeters per second to meters per second, multiply the number of centimeters per second by 0.01. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters per second by 100.

meters per second = centimeters per second × 0.01

Example: 10 centimeters per second = 0.1 meters per second.

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)

Meter Per Second (m/s)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI unit of speed. Walking pace is about 1.4 m/s; a sprinter reaches roughly 10 m/s.

Official standing arrived in 1960, when the CGPM established the SI and made the meter per second the unit for speed and velocity. Before that, feet per second, miles per hour and knots were more common, depending on region and trade. One proposal gave 1 m/s its own name, the benz, after Karl Benz, but it was rejected and never caught on, so the unit is still written as a plain ratio of meter to second.

The meter is now defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second, and the second by the vibration of caesium atoms, so the meter per second rests on two physical standards. Exactly 3.6 km/h make 1 m/s, and it equals about 2.2369 mph or 1.9438 knots. For scale, sound travels at about 343 m/s in dry air at 20 °C, and Chuck Yeager's Bell X-1 reached about 361 m/s, Mach 1.06, in October 1947. Physics and engineering use the unit almost exclusively.

The meter per second is the reference unit for speed on this site.

Sources: Wikipedia: Metre per second; NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition; Wikipedia: Sound barrier

Related conversions

See all speed units.