According to historians, his sense of political theater led him to avoid President Hoover’s attempts to involve him in dealing with the overwhelming crises before the country. Elected in the midst of a great depression, Roosevelt kept out of the fray during the long transition period between Election Day 1932 and Inauguration Day on March 4, 1933. It came from the presidency of Franklin D. So where did this come from and why do we still talk about it? David Alexrod, a top aide to President Obama once called it a “Hallmark Holiday”-lots of attention but no significance. It is a somewhat arbitrary and artificial milestone.
In the first hundred and forty-four years of the Republic no one made a big deal about the 100-day mark. Why 100 days? There is no constitutional or statutory significance to the first 100 days of a president’s term. He determined that a horse could do 33,000 foot-pounds of work in a minute (for example, move 330 pounds of coal 100 feet in a minute, or haul 33 pounds of coal 1000 feet in the same time), and dubbed that “one horsepower.” He then used that as a way to make the apples-to-oranges comparison between horses and his machinery, and could say that a steam engine had power equivalent to X number of horses.As we approach President Biden’s first 100 days in office many will use the occasion to evaluate his performance. He worked out the idea of horsepower while watching some draft horses lift coal at a mine (in some versions of the story, he watched a horse turn a mill wheel). He needed a way to explain his engine in terms that these people would understand. Some potential customers didn’t have a steam engine at all yet, though, and were still using draft horses to move weight and power machinery. This was easy enough when Watt was dealing with people who already had a Newcomen engine, and could directly compare the output of the old engine to his models. In the early days of the steam engine, inventor and engineer James Watt made some significant improvements to the Newcomen steam engine, and attempted to market and sell his new version.
None of these things seemingly have anything to do with horses, so where did that measurement come from? From your car, to your lawn mower, to your snow blower, to your chainsaw-the power of almost every engine you deal with is measured in terms of horsepower.
0 kommentar(er)
