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).
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!