At the time I was working at a nursing home, and all of the residents had these old-timey TVs. There was a complication that there could only be x converters per address, and 2021 Saint James Road in Springfield, IL, had about 80 residents, not x. I don’t know how we got around this, but we did.
It was at this time that I suggested just getting cable for the residents. I called our cable provider, asked about bulk rates, got a figure of (IIRC) $31 and change for a basic package (in 2006 dollars). Well apparently this was a Very Bad Idea. So inept and resistant to change were the managers of the nursing home, and the guardians of the residents who had guardians, that you’d have thought I suggested installing stripper poles in each room. Eventually we got a decent percentage of the residents hooked up with cable, but it was far too complicated than it needed to be.
That means 5.5. The actual bottom of the AM frequency band is 540Khz.
If you look at the numbers in the clear picture in post #4, the numbers are 5.5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 14, and 16. As you move upwards the numbers are farther apart in value, but not physically farther apart on the dial. With the exception of 16 at the top. You’d expect a 17 there.
So why 16? Because 1600 KHz was the top of the AM band.
There’s no point in making the mechanical tuner move outside the 540-1600 range. So they labeled the two ends appropriately and put a few other intermediate values in the middle. The nature of how the circuitry worked mean that the change in frequency was larger per unit of motion at the high end than the low. So the numbers got farther apart in value as you worked up the dial.
The whole design of tuner faces was non-linear sorta ad hoc adaptation to the deeper realities of the tech of the day. Nowadays such messy details can be hidden under layers of hardware and software so the UI can be straightforward and consistent-seeming even if the actual implementation is not.
Muntz developed a television chassis that produced an acceptable monochrome picture with 17 tubes. He often carried a pair of wire clippers, and when he thought that one of his employees was “overengineering” a circuit, he would begin snipping components out until the picture or sound stopped working. At that point, he would tell the engineer “Well, I guess you have to put that last part back in” and walk away.[14]