The audiogram’s form was contested because no standard existed for its axes.

Evidence

Thus, Fowler and Wegel developed what we now call the audiogram. At the time, it was standard to quantify frequency in cycles per second (note: the unit hertz was not established until 1930), and at the time, Wegel had already been plotting frequency in octaves, rather than using a linear scale. However, there was no standard for depicting the level (y) axis, and this was a topic hot for discussion. Two issues were of interest: the units to be used and the scale on which the thresholds should be plotted. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 92