and the rest:
Apparently, the unit of one horsepower was part of a marketing gimmick by James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, which he was very keen to have replace the use of horses to get work done. According to Wikipedia, Watt needed a way of comparing what a horse could do (something most folks were very aware of) with what his engine could do. Steam engines were replacing horses, the usual source of industrial power of the day. The typical horse, attached to a mill that ground corn or cut wood, walked a 24 foot diameter (about 75.4 feet circumference) circle. Watt calculated that the horse pulled with a force of 180 pounds, although how he came up with the figure is not known. Watt observed that a horse typically made 144 trips around the circle in an hour, or about 2.4 per minute. This meant that the horse traveled at a speed of 180.96 feet per minute. Watt rounded off the speed to 181 feet per minute and multiplied that by the 180 pounds of force the horse pulled (181 x 180) and came up with 32,580 ft.-lbs./minute. That was rounded off to 33,000 ft-pounds/minute, the figure we use today. Put into perspective, a healthy human can sustain about 0.1 horsepower. Most observers familiar with horses and their capabilities estimate that Watt was overly optimistic; few horses could maintain that effort for long.
OK, so the dynamometer measures two things: power (the rate of doing work) in HP and torque (the twisting force on the shaft) in ft-pounds. Obviously, these two measurements have the same numerical value when nothing is happening, i.e., at zero speed, but that is not very interesting