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).
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.