Actually, it would make more sense to think of it as a radio term. RCA and radios were the internet back in the 20's. There are alot of parallelisms between how RCA's stocks were overvalued and caused the stock market crash of 1929 and the "dot com" stocks were in modern times. Capacitors and inductors are used to shorten the electrical length of an antenna.....hence a condensor. The large variable capacitors are not a thing of the past. They are still commonly used in transmitters that require large working voltages in the KV range. People that have worked with radios for many years commonly call capacitors "condensors", tuners "couplers", dipoles "doublets", etc. I respect the traditional terminology and all the rich history that goes along with radios and commonly find myself using any of those terms. If you are talking about a .1uF filter capacitor in a PICmicro book, it would seem really wrong to call it a condensor. If you are talking about a capacitor in a radio circuit, there doesn't seem anything wrong with it to me. Mike ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dan Michaels" To: Sent: Monday, August 06, 2001 3:34 PM Subject: Re: [PIC]:eBook Available online for PIC > Mike Kendall wrote: > >A condensor is a capacitor in English. That is why the company "Cardwell > >Condensor" in the USA is named such. It is just a little old fashioned for > >most peoples vocabularies. > > > Back in the old days [I have seen old pictures ;-)], variable condensors > were those things with big movable metal plates. They must have thought > that electrons "condensed" out of the ether, and deposited onto those > plates, and this was how charge was stored. > > Today's use of the word "capacitor" [older capacitator ???] makes a > lot more sense, of course - the english do have a way with words. > > Better than "charge storage box", I guess - which is prolly what > some literal american would have named it. > > -- > http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics > (like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics > > -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics (like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics