| General > General Technical Chat |
| Why no Farad or Henry meter? |
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| retiredfeline:
It's just that you usually don't have to monitor capacitance or inductance but monitoring voltage and current is commonplace. Resistance less so, but enough measurements are made that such a meter has a name. Ammeter is just far easier to say than amperemeter. Voltmeter doesn't trip the tongue so much. If meters for capacitance or inductance were commonplace, I suspect they'd get shortened to farmeter and henmeter. :-DD Of course what really grates is that a potentiometer doesn't measure potentios and is not a meter, but a voltage divider. :-// |
| PlainName:
--- Quote ---I suspect they'd get shortened to farmeter and henmeter --- End quote --- Sounds cool! Perhaps we could start a trend tiktok using those >:D |
| switchabl:
Well, the OED dates all of these terms to the 1880s (voltmeter, ammeter, ohmmeter, wattmeter). These would generally have been electromechanical single function instruments. Capacitors and inductor on the other hand were measured using (manual and later semi-automatic) impedance bridges until well into the 1960/70s. Those probably shouldn't be called meters at all since they were based on substitution. AFAIK it was HP/Yokogawa who introduced the name "LCR meter" with the 4332A. Single function capacitance meters were never really a thing. I suppose they could still have called it "HFO meter" but I guess tastes had changed. Also, popular impedance bridges like the Type 650-A, introduced by General Radio in the 1930s, labelled measurement modes "CRL", so I guess people would have been somewhat familiar with that already. |
| JohanH:
I'm looking forward to the memristance meter. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: TimFox on November 27, 2023, 04:26:59 pm ---In France, it is pronounced (roughly) "me tre", hence the spelling. In America, it is pronounced "meet er", hence the spelling. --- End quote --- The word is pronounced the same in the US (where it’s spelled meter) and the UK (where it’s pronounced metre) so this explanation is clearly not correct. It’s simply a classic example of American English ending in -er where British* English ends in -re. Like theater and center, whose pronunciations are also the same in the US and the UK. (Ignoring rhoticity variants, since both the US and UK have rhotic and non-rhotic dialects.) *British and all the other non-US dialects, with the possible exception of Canadian, which picks and chooses American or British spellings depending on the word… :p |
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