James Watt needed to sell steam engines to men who owned horses, so he did the polite thing: he priced the machine in the animal it replaced. He watched a horse turn a mill wheel, estimated what one could pull, rounded the number, and froze it. That frozen horse is still working — it sits inside every engine rating written since. The car in the next bay has no engine, no combustion, nothing that pulls or breathes, and it still introduces itself by how many horses it is not. Four hundred horses. Six hundred. The future arrives measured in a farm animal that has been dead to the task for two hundred and forty years. Nobody removed the horse, because the horse was never really there — it was a courtesy, a translation for buyers who could not yet picture power without a body attached. We kept the courtesy and lost the buyers. Now the unit points at nothing. Stand a real one beside the charger and the two have nothing to say to each other: one is an animal, the other is a measurement wearing its name. The odd part is not that we still say horsepower. It is that we never noticed we stopped meaning it. —