After a while, television came to the kingdom and each neighborhood was
given a television transmitter to transmit all of the important news of the
neighborhood, and to broadcast the entertainment that the people of the
neighborhood liked best. (This was, as you can tell, in the days before
Cable.) At first the transmitters had only one frequency or channel -- but
this made for a problem. The people living near a border sometimes picked
up transmissions from their own neighborhood as well as the one over the
boundary line. The two signals got mixed up and fuzzy. They couldn't tell
what they were watching!
It was decided to solve the problem by making enough new channels so that
it could be arranged that the channel assigned to each neighborhood could
be different from the channel assigned to any bordering neighborhood. To
make a new channel required in those days an expensive tuning crystal
, and later they used special electronic vacuum tubes ... but that's
another story. Any way you looked at it, making new channels was going to
be expensive. How many channels do they need?
