Here’s a powerful nugget from history: the watt, the standard unit of power, is named after James Watt, the Scottish engineer who revolutionized the steam engine in the 18th century. But here’s the twist—Watt didn’t invent the steam engine; he made it dramatically more efficient, which helped spark the Industrial Revolution.

And fun fact: before the watt became standard, people often measured power using “horsepower,” a term Watt coined himself to market his engines. He calculated that one horse could do about 550 foot-pounds of work per second—and the rest is marketing genius.