Device ultimately put in so that resistance varied?

Usage examples of rheostat.

An automatic rheostat must have been mounted to the speaker, for the volume rose steadily, until the noise of the storm wind filled the office, a blast of rushing airlike the sounds of an experimental wind tunnel at maximum velocity.

I rewrote the program, put the lights on a rheostat with a photodiode to measure the lumens and connected everything to the computer.

Now on the panel in front of her there were two large dials and a single toggle-switch where before there had been rheostats and flashing lights.

There were only three switches on the box: a pushbutton to start the generator, a click-detent rheostat to activate Baby Two, and a shuttle knob for pointing the new collimator head toward a target.

There were coils, meters, switches, and rheostats that were outdated when Marconi was sending his first signals across the Atlantic.

The clients sometimes watched, sometimes entered into action, up to their elbows in blood and entrails, delicately touched rheostats that increased in slow stages the pain of the victims, drinking in the pain they saw before them.

His visit was merely for the purpose of gathering some apparatus, which included a Crookes tube, carefully packed, a rheostat, and some other paraphernalia which we divided.

The way in which the object of their attention modulates the bird-feather time scale, functioning like a sort of mental rheostat, generating a variable resistance.

Another minute of film, containing the subliminal message, is shot with minimal light intensity, with the rheostat turned all the way down.