this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
94 points (94.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35907 readers
1395 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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).

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] towerful@programming.dev 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's most likely as our understanding of the systems and the underlying physics have changed, so have the terminologies.
There was also the push for international standardisation of units. This probably helped push terms inline with the original discoverers terms, or were "rebranded" to honour the original/significant discoverers (or for politics or whatever).

Some terms will still be used due to legacy, because it's not worth trying to change it, or because the application is more inline with the original discovery.
The more modern terms probably refer to an improved design or different application of the same principle.
Eg a rheostat only has 2 terminals and works as a plain variable resistor, often built to handle higher power scenarios. A potentiometer uses 3 terminals and is often built for lower power scenarios.

While capacitor and condenser are the same thing, capacitor is likely more popular as it relates to it's SI unit. And it's SI unit describes what it does, It has capacity to store charge.

Things like valves Vs tubes. Tube describes what it is: a high vacuum tube. A valve describes what it does: varies the electricity flowing through it.
However, not all valves are vacuum tubes, some can be gas filled. And not all vacuum tubes are valves, for example television tubes.

A lot of this comes from multiple people developing similar things based on similar premises and applications, however all being slightly different. At the end of the day, the underlying physics is immutable, just the implementation and application changes.
And there was little-to-no communication between them, so people close to each discoverers would have used their implementation.
Sorta like Apple OSX Vs Windows. They are both desktop environment computers. But they do it in different ways to achieve the same result.
And then, all of these really useful technologies became standardised (or a clear "winner" emerged), and the terminology also became standardised.
All of which results in terms dropping out of favour

[โ€“] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 10 months ago

In Portuguese, and I imagine in other Latin languages too, capacitors are still condensadores. But many English terms are taking over native names.