The Crystal Radio
The previous April, Lee Ki-jo had hosted a Crystal Radio Making Contest through Cheongsan Radio Communications.
A Crystal Radio was a primitive receiver that needed no power at all. With no vacuum tubes or other such parts, it could pick up a broadcast using nothing but a mineral crystal and a coil of copper wire. Cheap and simple, it was also desperately weak: without an earphone, you could barely hear a thing.
Ki-jo published the method for building one and put up a modest prize, hoping to draw in students with a taste for radio or for science. Jeong In-cheol, president of Cheongsan Radio Communications, spent a month judging the entries that came in, then brought Ki-jo the grand prize, the top award, and the awards of excellence.
Ki-jo listened to the sets and turned to him.
"The grand-prize radio is clearly a cut above the rest. It deserves the award. You field-tested these, didn't you?"
"Yes. We took a fishing boat out to sea and listened, and we also tested whether they came through clearly at the Dogye Coal Mine."
Ki-jo nodded. Before summer arrived, he meant to manufacture crystal radios from the winning design and put them into hands all along the east coast.
On August 21, 1957, Typhoon Agnes would slam into the southern regions, leaving countless people homeless and property in ruins. Agnes was only the opening skirmish of the calamity that would bury the Republic of Korea in 1959—a preliminary warning, paid in advance of Typhoon Sarah, the storm that would lay the country waste. Yet Korea in the 1950s, even after living through Agnes, would make no adequate preparations for Sarah, and would be struck helpless.
A disaster-prevention system in that decade was all but nonexistent. Word of a typhoon on the foreign wires, mostly out of Japan, might appear in the newspapers, or the police might announce that a storm was coming and that people should take care, and that was the end of it. Officers at the coastal observation posts consulted Japanese radio broadcasts, checked the weather, and made their announcement. The air arm of the U.S. Eighth Army passed weather reports on to the government, but the government itself had neither the will nor the means to get that information out to the public.
Ki-jo intended to build crystal radios, distribute them through the regions expected to suffer, and put in place a system that could actually prepare for disaster.
"Is the grand-prize winner here?"
"Yes, Chairman."
Jeong In-cheol meant to hold the awards ceremony as soon as Ki-jo confirmed the winners. The recipients were waiting at the Cheongsan Radio Communications office in the Sejong-ro headquarters.
"Have them come to the station. We'll need photographs, and a press release."
"Yes, sir."
Jeong In-cheol telephoned headquarters, and the winners arrived. From the main office to the broadcasting station was a leisurely fifteen-minute walk.
When Ki-jo saw the man who had taken the grand prize, he started. He knew that face.
Wait—that man. He ran a radio repair shop...
In 1955, while Sunrye was working at a U.S. military post, she had picked up a broken radio the Americans had thrown away. Ki-jo carried it to a PX radio repair shop in Gwangbok-dong and had it fixed. The repair cost a week's wages. He had done it thinking that if he mended broken radios and sold them he might earn more than that, but both he and Sunrye fell for the set and never parted with it. They lived with that radio until 1968.
He had spoken with the man who repaired it. The friend who went with him to the shop knew the repairman.
"This is the fellow they used to call the electric doctor down in Hadong. I'm from Hadong myself, so I know him well. Same hometown."
"You flatter me."
"What are you talking about? Ask all of South Gyeongsang to produce someone who can fix a radio better than the boss here, and nobody would step forward. Ha ha."
"I gave you a discount because we're from the same town."
"Thank you, sir. My friend's got no money. If you'd charged full price, he couldn't have had it fixed. Ha ha ha."
What had stayed with Ki-jo was the man's face: humble, and yet quietly sure of himself.
If I had a skill like that, I could make a living with my hands too...
There had been envy in it.
Ki-jo came back from the old memory and looked again at the name on the list of winners.
Kim Hae-soo.
The instant he took the name in, the memories and knowledge of his eleventh life locked together.
Ah. It was him.
Kim Hae-soo was the man who developed the GoldStar A-501, Korea's first domestically made radio, and the finest radio engineer in the country.
Hold on. He originally joined Lucky Chemical...
In the autumn of 1958, Kim Hae-soo would apply to the radio factory established by Lucky Chemical Industrial and be accepted. The man who rendered such distinguished service in Koo In-hwoi's radio venture was as good as a founding contributor to LG Electronics.
Well, now. Is this fate, too?
An unexpected talent had walked in of his own accord, and Ki-jo's heart beat faster.
The money Koo In-hwoi spent building a radio factory in 1958 came to eighty-five thousand dollars. Early losses piled on top of that until the radio business was more than a hundred thousand dollars in the red, and only Park Chung-hee's support in 1961 kept the company alive. Ki-jo's thoughts grew tangled. Whether Park Chung-hee would even take power was uncertain, and for the present a radio business was all but guaranteed to lose money for a while. One thing, though, was certain. A loss of a hundred thousand dollars was nothing to him now. Dollars were pouring in from transport, shipping, and construction, and Miwon was turning cash over at a brisk clip. A year of the broadcasting business had already eaten a hundred thousand dollars, and Ki-jo's nerve had grown with it. So long as he was sure of the future, a deficit staring him in the face was nothing at all.
He greeted Kim Hae-soo and took his hand.
"How do you do? I'm Lee Ki-jo, chairman of Cheongsan."
"How do you do, Chairman? I'm Kim Hae-soo. I run a U.S. Army radio repair shop in Busan."
He wore a neat Western suit, his hair combed carefully back, and glasses sat over small eyes whose light was anything but ordinary. Without quite meaning to, Ki-jo held that hand longer than he usually would.
To prepare copy for the Hankook Ilbo and the Dong-A Ilbo, they held the awards ceremony and took photographs. Afterward, in the president's office, they sat with the winners over tea and refreshments, and all the while Ki-jo turned the problem over. He wanted to keep hold of Kim Hae-soo, but he still had no concrete plan for a radio business. Even so, with the man sitting in front of him, he could not hold the question back.
"Mr. Kim. What would you think of developing a Korean-made radio?"
Tossed out as casually as that, the question drew an answer with hardly a moment's hesitation.
"If we used Japanese sets as a reference, I think we could do it. I've taken apart every kind of imported radio while repairing them, and the Japanese Sanyo models were the best fit."
Captivated by the unhesitating reply, Ki-jo asked, "What do you mean, the best fit?"
"A Sanyo has no waste in the design, and the durability is already there. They use parts that aren't too expensive, and they still get a good sound."
"So if we borrowed Sanyo's design, we could bring the manufacturing cost down?"
"We could bring it down, but it would still be expensive. Even so, we wouldn't need a design as extravagant as RCA's, and we could secure a decent quality, like Zenith, while pricing it far below Zenith."
Ki-jo made up his mind.
I can't just let this man walk away.
He turned to the president of Cheongsan Radio.
"President Jeong, if our winners wouldn't mind, I'd like to treat them to a day and a night of seeing Seoul. Would that be possible?"
"Of course, Chairman."
"Book them a hotel."
Offered on the spot, the stay delighted the winners. Kim Hae-soo had room in his schedule as well, and agreed to remain in Seoul one more day.
As Ki-jo knew, the man was already a successful businessman. He had run a radio repair shop called Hwapyeong Electrical Works in Busan's International Market, and word of his skill spread until even American soldiers were coming and going. A captain responsible for the PX took notice and entrusted him with a repair shop inside the PX itself. He opened the first shop at the central PX in Gwangbok-dong, and soon after opened branches at Camp Hialeah in Yeonji-dong and at the 32nd Replacement Depot. A day of leisure in Seoul was not going to put a man like that in difficulty.
That evening Ki-jo went to the hotel to see him. Over tea in the coffee shop, he spoke about his own business.
"I have a great interest in radio."
"I know. You went into wired radio quite early, didn't you?"
"Yes. At the time I judged that getting radios into people's hands would be difficult, so it was a stopgap. Now I'm interested in distributing radios themselves."
"Are you?"
Kim Hae-soo's eyes lit.
"This year, to begin with, I want to distribute crystal radios."
Ki-jo explained what he intended.
"There's a severe gap in information between the cities and the countryside. City people can hear weather advisories and announcements easily. People in the villages and along the coast cannot."
"That's true. Radios are still far too expensive to spread."
"For this year I'll hand crystal radios out to fishermen and to people living along the coast and the rivers. Around next year, I'm thinking of starting a radio business in earnest..."
"It's a good idea. And if you're going to distribute sets based on the crystal radio I made, it's an honor for me personally."
He said he had been deeply moved by Ki-jo's public-minded work.
"The country is in a hard place, but I want to overcome the limits of the age, the way you do, Chairman."
"No. You give me too much credit. I only do it because it seems like the right thing."
Ki-jo was grateful to be described as a man overcoming the limits of his time. Wanting to overcome the age was a desire buried deep in him, and that Kim Hae-soo had seen it struck him as remarkable.
"Chairman, I don't have as much as you do, so I never dared think of it. But if there were someone like you, I always wanted to help."
"The truth is, getting weather forecasts out over the radio comes with a number of difficulties."
He told Kim Hae-soo what he had already tried. In the 1950s there was still no system for issuing forecasts to the public. At the same time as he opened the contest, Ki-jo had joined hands with the Hankook Ilbo and CBS and tried to build one. He wanted an alert system so ordinary people could prepare for disasters that were relatively predictable, typhoons among them, but the government would not help. Objections came at once from both the Ministry of National Defense and the Ministry of Communications. Their fear was that information about Korea's weather could be sent north by spies and used as military intelligence. Forecast the weather over a region with an air base, they argued, and spies would know the aircraft could not take off and turn that knowledge against you. Let it be known that heavy seas were coming, and the North could make use of it. In a decade with no natural-disaster system at all, the logic of national security made even the barest preparation impossible.
Weather information passed from the U.S. Eighth Army to the Korean government, and releasing even a little of it to the public would have meant fewer people simply sitting still while a disaster came down on them. The government would not do even that.
When Ki-jo sketched the official attitude toward distributing crystal radios, Kim Hae-soo grew indignant.
"Chairman, if I refine the crystal radio I made just a little further, it will pull in Japanese broadcasts much more clearly. People can follow Japanese well enough, roughly speaking. We could cut the damage in the south."
Seeing the will in him, Ki-jo asked, "Would you help me with the radio business?"
"Of course. This crystal radio, and if next year you mean to make a Korean radio, call me first. I'll add whatever small strength I have."
"Thank you, President Kim."
"President? That's hardly right. I'm in no position to be called a president."
Ki-jo was glad to have the promise, even if it was only spoken.
"You know there's a fragmentation-mine plant in Yeonji-dong, don't you?"
"Of course. My second repair shop is at Camp Hialeah, right near your factory."
"I plan to build a crystal-radio factory at the Yeonji-dong plant. If you'll stop by from time to time, I'll see that you're properly repaid."
"I don't need repayment. If you want to repay me, make me the man in charge of the crystal-radio factory."
"I hear you have several repair shops. How do you mean to keep them running?"
"I've spent more than four years training repairmen. They run fine without me. It won't be a problem."
It was exactly like the Kim Hae-soo who, when Lucky went recruiting radio technicians, had walked out of his PX shop without a backward glance. This time, too, if he could build radios with his own hands, he did not mean to let the chance slip.
"Then I'll establish a company. The provisional name is Cheongsan Electronics. Would you serve as its president?"
Ki-jo asked it with careful courtesy.
"Yes. I will. If it's a crystal radio, I'm confident I can make the best one in Korea. I'll build them so they aren't too expensive, and so they won't be a burden on you when you distribute them."
"Thank you."
Ki-jo clasped his hand and bowed his head.
Even in the 1950s, there were people who chose a dream over money. Kim Hae-soo was one of them. If he could make radios, he would walk into a factory to see that dream through, even if his income fell. What he wanted was to found, in Korea, an electrical company like Japan's Matsushita.
"President Kim, when you go home, please think it over for one more week. In a week I'll send a contract to your house."
He added that if Kim's mind changed in the meantime, there would be no need to send the contract at all.
"I'm the one who's worried your mind will change, Chairman. The crystal radios, and real radios too—you're going to see an enormous loss."
Kim Hae-soo laughed. Even so, he did not believe Lee Ki-jo was a man whose mind would turn because of money.