want to see something cool imagine electricity like hitting a baseball voltage is how fast the ball is moving amperage is how much the ball weighs and watts is how fast it speeds up when you hit it and you just gained an intrinsic understanding of watts in 10 seconds the watt is named after James Watt who the book is going to tell you invented the steam engine and he totally did after vitrus Heron Tak alen and the two Thomas' Savory and nukan nukan invented the first commercially successful engine with a piston and cylinder watt worked at the University of Glasgow in 1773 when someone asked him to fix a toy model of Nan's engine 3 years later while America was learning how to make tea in Boston Harbor watt was selling his first giant engines to pump water in 1908 they named the unit of power in his honor the physics on this is a because people confuse power with energy energy is the ability to do work power is how fast work is actually being done and if you can't tell the difference between the potential to do and how fast is actually getting done then get the out of engineering and go get an MBA because you got a great future in management the mechanical wad is mass times acceleration due to gravity time height divided by the time it takes to lift the object to the given height gives the rate of doing work or power it takes one wat of power to maintain a constant velocity of 1 m/s against a force of 1 nton a 200 lb dude climbing 10 ft in 5 seconds is about 500 watts an average man is good for a sustained output of about 75 Watts for a full shift then there's the wire watt one watt is the rate at which electrical work is performed when a current of 1 amp flows across a potential difference of 1 volt this is where we get the term volt ampere which is almost a watt but not really don't worry about it for now we'll learn about power factor later and see if you can cry an electrician DC is as easy as your sister though the big thing you need to remember is volts time amps equals Watts one volt is the same amount of power at 1,000 amps as 1,000 volts is at 1 amp let that marinate a while because it's a secret sauce of the entire National power grid crank up the volts and you can have skinny wires powering whole cities and that's pretty cool