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