Miles Per Hour to Centimeters Per Second (mph to cm/s)

1 mile per hour equals 44.704 centimeters per second exactly.

1 mile per hour = 44.704 centimeters per second

How to convert miles per hour to centimeters per second

To convert miles per hour to centimeters per second, multiply the number of miles per hour by 44.704. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply centimeters per second by 0.02236936292 (rounded).

centimeters per second = miles per hour × 44.704

Example: 10 miles per hour = 447.04 centimeters per second.

About these units

Mile Per Hour (mph)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

Exactly 0.44704 m/s. The unit for road speeds in the US, UK and a few other countries.

Early British motoring law is the best window into this unit. The 1861 Locomotive Act set a limit of 10 mph for light locomotives. The 1865 Red Flag Act cut it to 4 mph in the country and 2 mph in towns, with a person walking ahead with a flag. The Locomotives on Highways Act of 1896 raised it to 14 mph, and the Motor Car Act of 1903 to 20 mph. In 1931 all limits for cars were abolished, and 30 mph in built-up areas returned in 1935.

The mile per hour combines the mile, set at 5,280 feet in Elizabeth I's reign, with the hour, and it equals exactly 0.44704 m/s or 1.609344 km/h. The United Kingdom and United States use it on roads, along with several smaller countries, mostly territories or former territories of those two, and the US, Canada and Ireland use it for rail. Sports such as cricket, tennis and baseball quote ball speeds in it. Aviation and shipping prefer knots, about 0.869 of one mph each.

1 mile per hour = 0.44704 meters per second (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Miles per hour; Wikipedia: Speed limits in the United Kingdom; Wikipedia: Mile

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)

Related conversions

See all speed units.