A typo (a respected auto company's, not ours) arose recently in citing torque. The lb.-ft., you may recall, is our English unit of torque, for example, of the twisting force produced by an engine's output shaft. To sense 1 lb.-ft. of torque, think of grasping one end of a 1-ft. ruler that has a 1-lb. mass at the other end. (To perfect the image, imagine too that the ruler itself is weightless.)
By contrast-and confoundedly enough-there's also an English unit called the ft.-lb., which is utterly unrelated to the lb.-ft. A ft.-lb. is a unit of work, specifically, the work required to raise a 1-lb. mass a vertical distance of 1 ft.
Last, there's the corrupted lb./ft., which doesn't represent anything that I know of.
But What About BHP?
One horsepower, which sounds suspiciously like the power of one horse, is evidently a unit of power, that is, work per unit time.
In fact, in our English system, 1 horsepower is defined as 550 ft.-lb./sec. Let's analyze this: It's the power required to raise 550 lb. a distance of 1 ft. in 1 second or, equivalently, any arithmetic blend thereof. Say, for example, raise 137.5 lb. (i.e., 1¼4 of 550 lb.) a distance of 2 ft. in 0.5 sec.
Aha! Here's something we can get our hands on. When a ballet dancer lifts his (perhaps a bit hefty) partner above his head in quick time, he's exerting 1 horsepower. So much for those guys being wimps.
What's a brake horsepower? It's horsepower derived from measurements on a brake dynamometer, a device that actually measures the engine torque it's absorbing. The relationship is bhp = (torque x rpm)/5252, where torque is given in lb.-ft. and rpm is exactly what you think it is.
Last, come to think of it, I believe the ballerina helps a bit with a little jump.
As noted in The Orange County Register, the federal government's National Center for Atmospheric Research recently posed an open-book exam, of sorts, to some 30 laboratories in eight nations. NCAR provided an unknown gas sample to each facility, and asked for its identification and measurement. This, note, is more than an academic game. As environmental standards and controls become tighter and tighter, measurements of efficacy become all the more subtle.
Outperforming the rest in its analysis of the sample was the Blake-Rowland Research Group of our nearby University of California, Irvine. In doing so, it finished ahead of prestigious places like Harvard and England's University of East Anglia.
By the way, Road Test Editor Patrick Hong did his undergraduate work at UCI. I haven't got around to asking him how he did in his chemistry classes.
Commuting or Cooking
This same news item cited another finding of UCI researchers Don Blake and F. Sherwood Rowland, one that surprised me despite the fact that it dated from 1995.
For a long time, the automobile had been blamed for Mexico City's dense smog. In fact, one scheme had half the cars banned from the streets on alternate days, depending on their even- or odd-numbered license plates. Apparently, this only encouraged well-to-do residents to buy a second car and plate it appropriately.
However, it turned out there's also quite a different culprit: unburned liquefied petroleum gas leaking from household tanks and appliances. LPG is a primary energy source for cooking and heating in Mexico City. Blake and Rowland found that high atmospheric concentrations of propane and related compounds were playing a major role in the region's ozone production.
Guess Where the Most Steel Is Produced?
I grew up as a steelworker's son. In fact, my undergraduate work at Worcester Polytechnic Institute came courtesy of a scholarship from the American Steel & Wire Co., at the time a division of U.S. Steel Corp.
Thus, an item in Automotive News, our business's weekly trade journal, caught my eye. It listed the top 10 steel companies in the world for 2001. Curiously, there's not a single U.S. firm on the list.
The countries cited, in order of company output, were Luxembourg, Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, China, the U.K., Germany, Italy, and Japan twice more. By far, the firm with the largest output was Luxembourg's Arcelor.