What caused the shift from calling things like rheostats and condensers to resistors and capacitors, or the move from cycles to Hertz?
It seemed to just pop up out of nowhere, seeing as the previous terms seemed fine, and are in use for some things today (like rheostat brakes, or condenser microphones).
“Resistor” usually implies a device with a fixed resistance value. A rheostat is a device with variable resistance. The two terms are not synonymous.
As for condenser and capacitor, Wikipedia has an interesting tidbit:
Early capacitors were known as condensers, a term that is still occasionally used today, particularly in high power applications, such as automotive systems. The term was first used for this purpose by Alessandro Volta in 1782, with reference to the device’s ability to store a higher density of electric charge than was possible with an isolated conductor. The term became deprecated because of the ambiguous meaning of steam condenser, with capacitor becoming the recommended term in the UK from 1926, while the change occurred considerably later in the United States.
On dit aussi beaucoup une capacité ou simplement une capa Pas sur si c’est un angliscisme ou une norme qui évolué
We also say capacité, or simply capa, I am not sure whether it’s borrowed from English, or whether the official terminology evolved
So, that’s where Finnish borrowed that word… like so many other words too. Perhaps calling it borrowing isn’t entirely fair, since this thing has been going on for so long and it’s been really extensive. Sort of like the way the British Museum “borrowed” a significant part of their collection from somewhere else.
Perhaps calling it borrowing isn’t entirely fair,
I know, over here we would call that robbery at knife point ;)
This seems like a fun rabbit hole to go down with regard to capacitors vs condensers, but a rheostat and a resistor are not the same, and both are used by these names in electronics today.
Another player is the potentiometer, which handles low power variability. That’s about the extent of my ability to shed light here though. I look forward to other more knowledgeable than I am adding to (and likely correcting) my comments.
Edit: typo and clarification
Edit2: A family member was re-assembling an audio amp and set a 1-farad cap on his just wiped countertop (which happened to be damp still) and blew a crater in the cheap Formica. We laughed, and nobody was hurt. I was 14, and learned that a capacitor sure can discharge quickly!
What kind of amp uses a full farad of capacitance?
The ones I see tend to be a few thousand microfarads, maybe 20-40k for high end stuff. OTOH sometimes you see innoculous looking supercaps for storing settings; I’ve got dome out of an old Technics tuner that are like 3F… at 3v. Not sure there’s enough oomph to do that damage even at 3F.
I asked him what it was and have yet to hear back. He was known for fiddling and upgrading, but I may be mixed up between his car amp and home amp. I know he used to add whole-farad caps to provide “punch” for the car amp without dimming his headlights, but I thought his Denon Optical Class amp had a big cap, but in hindsight, that makes less sense, as there’s not much call for it after a dedicated power stage.
I’ll update when if he gets back to me with a useful answer.
Rheostats are a type of variable resistor, commonly seen in the form of potentiometers.
“Condenser” came from the analogy of steam power’s condenser, which was a recent/new thing for steam engines around the same time people were starting with electricity. Language changed, though, because the analogy was imperfect.
Increased specificity. As someone else mentioned rheostats are variable, which is implied by the suffix -stat.
But also electricity is already hard to learn when everything is named after what it does. If you’re working with circuits a lot you’re gonna start calling resistors resistors because they provide resistance and engineers are like that. Similarly capacitors entire thing is revolving around a set capacity for charge that we call capacitance. I know impedance devices have their own special name but by the gods I really want to call them impeders or “that coil thing with the electromagnetic slowing”. I’m not an EE, I rarely fuck with electricity but yeah eventually they were gonna get called these things as we got to understand them better as the fundamental building blocks of circuitry.
Also condensers are a different thing in thermo so that may contribute here.
To add to the other answers you’ve gotten, “cycles” and “hertz” are both still used. The frequency (in Hz) is a count of how many cycles are in a one second period. A datasheet for an electronic device might have the frequency it’s compatible with listed on it (typically 60Hz in the US, 50Hz in Europe).
For some signal processing and protection equipment you’d also see a number of cycles listed on the datasheet - that will always be paired with a “at X Hz” clarification, because it’s functionally telling you how long the device takes to operate. For utility line circuit breakers, for example, “3 cycle” and “5 cycle” breakers are the most common options in the US, where 3 cycles translates to “this breaker will be fully open within 3/60 of one second of a trip command.”
