How fast could a horse go if it had a transmission?

Jim K

Jim K

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I was whipping my 400 horses (Cummins flavor) this evening, hitched to 30,000 lbs of truck and 50,000 of soybeans. I was thinking how cool it would be to have 400 actual horses hitched to the truck. It wouldn't be very practical though, as a horse just doesn't go fast enough. That's when it dawned on me...horses just needed transmissions. Giant treadmill, transmission, drive axle. The weight would be an issue. Not very aerodynamic either. I need to get some sleep.
 
Jim K said:
I was whipping my 400 horses (Cummins flavor) this evening, hitched to 30,000 lbs of truck and 50,000 of soybeans. I was thinking how cool it would be to have 400 actual horses hitched to the truck. It wouldn't be very practical though, as a horse just doesn't go fast enough. That's when it dawned on me...horses just needed transmissions. Giant treadmill, transmission, drive axle. The weight would be an issue. Not very aerodynamic either. I need to get some sleep.
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A horse weighs 1000 pounds and a semi trailer can carry about 10 of them. So, you'd have 50,000 pounds of soybeans in one trailer, plus 400,000 pounds of horses on 40 trailers! A road train of that size most likely can't be pulled by 400 horses anyway, so now we need more horses and more trailers and... That's gonna be one heckuva complicated transmission.
 
I might be wrong, but according to what I have read, a horse can supply its vaunted 1 HP of sustained power through something like a working day. I'm sure that would be at their slowest speed though, walking, not trotting or galloping. So yes, your proposed need for a "transmission" seems correct. A treadwheel could theoretically be constructed then to convert horse linear movement to rotary motion, and then geared appropriatedly to power wheels, pulling a trailer all day. Of course you would need 400 horses in the treadwheel or multiple treadwheels somehow working in unison, with the horses wallking all day. The mechanical complexity would be enormous, not to mention (as above) the logistics of caring for the horses daily!

Beasts of burden were once used to operate machinery such as in grain mills, converting their linear motion to rotary motion, pulling lever arms connected to drive shafts while moving in circles. I think this was first done by the Romans, or at least they did do this if my dim memory of history is right. Another, possibly more modern and practical scenario, might be to use horse teams to drive rotary motion that would drive electric generators, which would in turn charge electric vehicles. This assumes electric tractor cabs actually exist, or will soon. If what the media reports is correct they should. Such a scheme would actually be "green" and renewable if the horses had a nearby pasture to graze and a source of water like a pond or stream to drink.

Of course, apropos to POA, one could, in theory, also use horsepower to charge the batteries of electric planes. Somehow I can't see this happening any time soon!
 
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If cows belching is bad for the ozone layer, imagine what 400 horses farting would do!

As my grandpa used to say, “the horse that farts can never tire. The man that farts is the man to hire.”
 
Does anyone here remember 20 mule team Borax?
Sponsor of Death Valley Days stories, which were all strange, but mostly true.

Challenging skill to get that many mules going at the same time, and in the same gear, usually granny low. Death Valley had square miles of borax, but it was all uphill and soft ground going out.

One of the narrators made the big time, Ronald Reagan!
 
172andyou said:
The good news is that a good horse can produce a sustained 5-6 horsepower for a few hours at a time. So you really only need about 80 horses. Much more practical.



I may be reading too much into this, but I see HIMS in your future. ;-)
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I don't think a horse can sustain that level of power for very long - google says a few minutes to "less than an hour".

As Watt defined it, horsepower is a measure of the ability to do work. He based his 1 HP rating on the sustained amount of work a standard horse could do over a workday. By definition 1 horsepower provides the power to do 33,000 foot-pounds of work in one minute. It can lift 1 pound 33K feet or 33K pounds 1'. Or anything in between. Gearing changes the velocity of the work, not the amount.
 
kyleb said:
I don't think a horse can sustain that level of power for very long - google says a few minutes to "less than an hour".

As Watt defined it, horsepower is a measure of the ability to do work. He based his 1 HP rating on the sustained amount of work a standard horse could do over a workday. By definition 1 horsepower provides the power to do 33,000 foot-pounds of work in one minute. It can lift 1 pound 33K feet or 33K pounds 1'. Or anything in between. Gearing changes the velocity of the work, not the amount.
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My google search suggested 15hp for a few minutes and 5 or 6 sustainable for hours. FWIW, my sanity check was that a human could do one human power (also, inconveniently, HP) hiking around all day. Could sprint all out for a few minutes. Could jog for a few hours.

The only way to know for sure is for @Jim K to run the experiment.
 
Electric or gas powered horses?
The electric ones have more torque.
 
geezer said:
Does anyone here remember 20 mule team Borax?
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I also watched enough old westerns to know what a muleskinner is…

I had a (mostly online) friend who was a B-24 copilot in WWII. Apparently his left pinky was a little weak, because every time he typed “Maule” he missed the “a” and typed Mule. When I needed screen names where Maulepilot was taken (like here) I started using MauleSkinner as a substitute. It still reminds me of Harvey, now gone west.

Every time I think about that generation, and pilots in particular, I’m more and more amazed at what kids in their late teens and early twenties were doing on a daily basis.

Back to your regularly scheduled chaos. ;)
 
MauleSkinner said:
If cows belching is bad for the ozone layer, imagine what 400 horses farting would do!
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Horses aren't ruminants, so they aren't as bad as cows. They still produce methane, but not nearly as much. And methane doesn't bother the ozone layer, though it's a pretty effective greenhouse gas.

Just keepin' POA pedantic...
 
How big would a 400 Horse Power airplane have to be? And are we talking Shetland ponies or quarter horses?
 
davela said:
I might be wrong, but according to what I have read, a horse can supply its vaunted 1 HP of sustained power through something like a working day. I'm sure that would be at their slowest speed though, walking, not trotting or galloping. So yes, your proposed need for a "transmission" seems correct. A treadwheel could theoretically be constructed then to convert horse linear movement to rotary motion, and then geared appropriatedly to power wheels, pulling a trailer all day. Of course you would need 400 horses in the treadwheel or multiple treadwheels somehow working in unison, with the horses wallking all day. The mechanical complexity would be enormous, not to mention (as above) the logistics of caring for the horses daily!

Beasts of burden were once used to operate machinery such as in grain mills, converting their linear motion to rotary motion, pulling lever arms connected to drive shafts while moving in circles. I think this was first done by the Romans, or at least they did do this if my dim memory of history is right. Another, possibly more modern and practical scenario, might be to use horse teams to drive rotary motion that would drive electric generators, which would in turn charge electric vehicles. This assumes electric tractor cabs actually exist, or will soon. If what the media reports is correct they should. Such a scheme would actually be "green" and renewable if the horses had a nearby pasture to graze and a source of water like a pond or stream to drink.

Of course, apropos to POA, one could, in theory, also use horsepower to charge the batteries of electric planes. Somehow I can't see this happening any time soon!
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Great point on the old mills and stuff. That is quite literally a horse transmission. If the goal is literally a horse powered truck, then putting those horses to work charging batteries is clearly the best solution. I wonder if there's enough fat on a horse to render it into bio diesel....

I was originally thinking that horse speed is limited by its weight, but I spent a little time noodling on this with Claude this afternoon (thanks autosteer!) I was thinking of bicycles...humans can move more efficiently on a bicycle than on foot by something like a factor of 2. I was thinking that the transmission and wheels were what made bicycles more efficient, but claude told me that the real magic is in removing the inefficiency of our feet. Apparently something like 3/4 of the energy is used up by moving your feet up/down and the starting/stopping motion. Since a horse clearly can't ride a bicycle, we're looking at a treadmill/cart arrangement, and that brings back in all the inefficiency.

Fascinatingly, it also claimed that at walking speed, on level ground, would only require about five horses. 10mph stagecoach speeds would take around 25. Interestingly, it says that mules are better at sustained heavy pulls like this, and the proverbial "20 mule team" would actually be a great choice. The infamous borax rig weighed about 36 tons, compared to my 40.
 
Horses do have sort of transmission and the gears are walk, trot, cantor, and gallop.
 
The pulling is one issue, the stopping is yet another.
Then there's the practical matter of harness, bitting and reins.
 
I believe the avg horse drinks 10 gallons of water a day, so you need to carry that oh and has about 33 pounds of fecal waste as well, so they must eating many pounds of food too. Mucho logistics involved if you go further than what you carry
 
Randomskylane said:
I believe the avg horse drinks 10 gallons of water a day, so you need to carry that oh and has about 33 pounds of fecal waste as well, so they must eating many pounds of food too. Mucho logistics involved if you go further than what you carry
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Pony express solved that problem like 150 years ago.

Fun fact: I had no idea the pony express was around for such a short period of time. When I googled to see how long ago it was, I also found out that it only operated for 18 months before the first transcontinental telegraph lines went live and obsoleted the service. Ooops!
 
davela said:
I might be wrong, but according to what I have read, a horse can supply its vaunted 1 HP of sustained power through something like a working day. I'm sure that would be at their slowest speed though, walking, not trotting or galloping. So yes, your proposed need for a "transmission" seems correct. A treadwheel could theoretically be constructed then to convert horse linear movement to rotary motion, and then geared appropriatedly to power wheels, pulling a trailer all day. Of course you would need 400 horses in the treadwheel or multiple treadwheels somehow working in unison, with the horses wallking all day. The mechanical complexity would be enormous, not to mention (as above) the logistics of caring for the horses daily!

Beasts of burden were once used to operate machinery such as in grain mills, converting their linear motion to rotary motion, pulling lever arms connected to drive shafts while moving in circles. I think this was first done by the Romans, or at least they did do this if my dim memory of history is right. Another, possibly more modern and practical scenario, might be to use horse teams to drive rotary motion that would drive electric generators, which would in turn charge electric vehicles. This assumes electric tractor cabs actually exist, or will soon. If what the media reports is correct they should. Such a scheme would actually be "green" and renewable if the horses had a nearby pasture to graze and a source of water like a pond or stream to drink.

Of course, apropos to POA, one could, in theory, also use horsepower to charge the batteries of electric planes. Somehow I can't see this happening any time soon!
Click to expand...
Rube Goldberg is alive and well, now using the pseudonym davela!
 
Jim K said:
I was whipping my 400 horses (Cummins flavor) this evening, hitched to 30,000 lbs of truck and 50,000 of soybeans. I was thinking how cool it would be to have 400 actual horses hitched to the truck. It wouldn't be very practical though, as a horse just doesn't go fast enough. That's when it dawned on me...horses just needed transmissions. Giant treadmill, transmission, drive axle. The weight would be an issue. Not very aerodynamic either. I need to get some sleep.
Click to expand...
All I know is my diesel pickup makes more than 400 horses and gets 6 mpg pulling my 18,000lbs of trailer. I could put them both on a 15,000lb trailer, pull all 46,000lbs with your 30,000lb truck, and get 7 mpg.

Proof current automotive engineering trend of small displacement/ high rpm and DPF's is idiotic!
 
Somewhere I read, so it must be true, that the most efficient form of human powered transportation is the bicycle. Sounds plausible.

Jim, you need to design a bicycle for a horse. Then get one of the kids to teach a horse how to ride a bicycle. Take lots of video.
 
Horse Equation: If you launch a rocket into space, you have to burn fuel. The fuel weighs something, so you need more fuel to burn to lift the fuel, etc. It's called the Rocket Equation. I see something similar here. The Horse Equation. A horse powered airplane would require a heavy horse. To lift the horse you need more power, more horses, which weigh more and need more horses. Thus, you might need an infinite number of horses. Or less gravity.

Maximum HP: Now, when BTW does a horse produce sustained HP? Walking Speed: In practical terms, a working draft horse pulling a heavy load at a steady pace of 2.5 mph outputs roughly 1 horsepower continuously over a full workday.

Thus, create a constant speed treadmill transmission to match that input speed to maximize HP. Maybe a simple belt drive torque converter, or something more efficient like a gear driven constant speed.

Or.... electro motive. Have the horse treadmill run a generator, and use electric traction motors. Instead of diesel electric, you would have horse electric traction.
 
Albany Tom said:
Somewhere I read, so it must be true, that the most efficient form of human powered transportation is the bicycle. Sounds plausible.

Jim, you need to design a bicycle for a horse. Then get one of the kids to teach a horse how to ride a bicycle. Take lots of video.
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Probably 4H and FFA badge worthy right there.
 
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