The Comic Book World Of Capacitor Marketing
The Economist is an attractive publication, a British weekly that looks like a magazine for the whole world and contains important information about global politics and economic movements. It's one of those rare print newsletters that manages to keep up with even news enthusiasts online, despite its weekly publication date.
At the time, their extensive coverage of the global industry was characterized by the publication of the latest articles on the world of supercapacitors, focusing on Estonian frame technology. This is an exciting area where products are gradually approaching energy density parity with conventional batteries, and news of a new manufacturing facility appearing online will be of interest to many Hackaday readers.
Although it may be interesting, this article is not an inspiring news story about a new capacitor factory in Germany. Rather, it is the language used by an economist who carefully avoids the distinction between the words "supercapacitor" and "ultracapacitor." Images of flying criminals in brightly colored capes immediately come to mind as Captain Ultra and Superman face off against an arch-rival who should have lazily thrown flaming kryptonite at the wall in preparation for the ultimate finish.
Actually, comic book wars are a good analogy. Just as DC's Captain Marvel Ultra and DC's Superman competed with their counterparts for storage space and the hearts and minds of children in the last decades of the last century, so the global giants of the energy storage capacitor industry compete for control of the unseen, but equally not-so-unseen. : - standard memory market: profitable volatile materials, which later became their main application.
In one corner are NEC and Panasonic with their supercapacitors, in the other Pinnacle Research Institute and Maxwell with their supercapacitors. A lot, poof! Let the fight begin, even though the Zap! that's not necessarily the sound you want to hear from a loud, fully charged capacitor.
Each of these two terms was originally coined by inventors from successive iterations of the technology, but when they met in the marketplace, they were applied to nearly identical products that essentially perform the same function. . There is nothing thicker than a slip of paper between their prefix definitions;
super excellent On go out
Ultra : outside; On the other hand
So both terms are equivalent words for the same product, the only difference today is the marketing approach of the manufacturer you are referring to. Then there is the question of how to avoid confusion in the minds of non-technical readers when addressing it, and as is often the case with linguistic questions that are not easy to answer.
Sometimes language differences arise due to local customs, for example, you can say "Jah", I will say "Jah". In other cases, they come from arbitrary decisions of a single language, as in the work of famous lexicographers such as Samuel Johnson or Noah Webster. Faced with competing languages, modern lexicographers take a more cautious approach, eschewing this pre-grativism in favor of a descriptive approach where they see the language as it is used. They maintain large corpora, large areas of written language, on which they perform statistical analysis to extract conclusive evidence for their linguistic research.
Unfortunately, at Hackaday we do not have a modern English corpus to assist our authors in their research. However, thanks to the internet, we have a handy resource to compare two simple words like Google Trends. Comparing the search performance of these two terms on Google is a very useful way to quickly see which one has the advantage, in which case the answer is very simple. "Supercapacitor" has about five times more browsing volume than "Ultracapacitor", so it is definitely the leader in terms of usage.
Looking at the history of the region, it makes sense that Ultracapacitor is slightly more popular in the US than anywhere else in the world, but even there Ultracapacitor is the leader. It's probably safer to call them "supercapacitors" to avoid confusion, unless you mean a product specifically labeled as an ultracapacitor.
Linguistic questions so often turn into semantic disputes that dance on pins and needles, but there is also a practical side to these discussions. If you've ever turned a piece of your work into a product, its success or failure could have been determined by something as simple as a bad word of mouth. One day we found a company that makes small aggregate crushers, an *absolutely* fantastic product that can crush anything . - whose sales changed when they ditched the beloved term "Compact Crusher" and adopted the industry favorite term "Mini Crusher". So it pays to do that kind of research and be prepared to knock the object of your linguistic cult off its pedestal if it doesn't fit.
Elna supercapacitor image by Elcap (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.
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