199698

This tube has, besides its GE catalognumber, a military designation: in 1952 the US army called these tubes 3H600-.5 .It is printed on the side of the cardboard box. I googled for this type number and had a few hits in a language i do not know. I'll upload pictures this week...

Patrick,

Tungar rectifiers were not sold in the radio market, rather in battery charger applications. They went to car electrical repair shops, or to other customers that used rechargeable lead batteries, as railroads. More or less as for X-ray tubes or other electro-medical devices, they were handled by different sales departments, the 'Appliance and Merchandise Department' in the case of General Electric. 

The alternate code you read on the tube box may refer to an internal spec, assigned by the manufacturer of a battery charge model which used this kind of rectifiers. It could simply mean that the GE 199698 rectifier in that box was a suitable replacement in a line of battery chargers qualified by U.S. Military, according to the part list given in its technical manual. The use of internal specs was quite common to associate different codes of different manufacturers to any replacement part. In this case, under its internal spec, the manufacturer of the equipment could supply equivalent rectifiers made by GE, Westinghouse and maybe  Philips.

Emilio