Bringing RCA to My Side
In the café inside the U.S. military PX, three men sat together over coffee, taking their ease.
Ki-jo looked perfectly calm. Jacob of RCA, by contrast, seemed distinctly unsettled. He had just come face to face with an unexpected reality in Korea.
Frank studied the two men's opposing expressions and found himself growing curious about how Ki-jo meant to move the matter along. He had carried his doubts about the man for some time. Drawing a deal out of an executive of a major American corporation had struck him as a hard thing to do—and yet, to his surprise, Ki-jo had begun shaking his counterpart from the very first exchange.
"Mr. Jacob, do you really mean to leave Zenith alone? Japanese-made Zenith is only going to gather more strength."
To Frank's eye, Ki-jo was working to put the man on edge.
"I don't see them as a serious threat yet. What Zenith is producing in Japan right now is the old vacuum-tube radio. And portable sets of that sort aren't even their main line."
Jacob, shaken a moment before, was struggling to recover his composure.
Frank tried to watch both sides with a clear eye, but he was only human, and despite himself his sympathies kept tilting toward Ki-jo. He wanted Jacob pulled into this venture one way or another, and he wanted Ki-jo to make a success of it. Push just a little harder, he thought, and victory would be within reach.
Ki-jo, for his part, was arriving at a different judgment. Jacob was no easy mark. He turned the man's answer over, set his thoughts in order, and asked again.
"It sounds as if RCA doesn't mean to attach much importance to Zenith's moves. Radios will develop along transistor lines from here on, so you're saying vacuum-tube sets aren't worth your concern?"
At that, Jacob looked at him closely—the look of a man seeing someone in a new light.
"How did you know that?"
"Because that's where the technology is going."
Jacob nodded.
Transistor radios had not yet appeared in the world. Inside the industry, people expected them to become the mainstream before long, but the prevailing view was still that the moment had not come. That Ki-jo already knew as much was startling. A man from an underdeveloped country in Asia, seemingly fluent in the technological current of the advanced world—there was something fresh in the very fact of it.
But Ki-jo remembered history with precision. Five months from this day, in November 1954, the world's first transistor radio would be shown to the world. A model called the Regency TR-1 would burst onto the American scene like a comet.
However small a vacuum-tube radio became, it was still the size of a shoebox. This one would fit in a grown man's palm. The transistor revolution astonished people by its miniaturization before they had even felt the difference in performance. The Regency TR-1, a radio you could slip into a pocket and carry about with you, was a product that would stand comparison with the Walkman revolution Sony later set off.
When Ki-jo began reeling off the latest electronics terminology as if it were nothing, Jacob straightened in his seat and asked.
"Did you happen to major in electronics at university?"
"No. I was running a brick company, and only recently founded a radio communications firm."
"Ah, I see. Businessmen do pick up new things quickly. Ha ha."
Frank could feel the change in Jacob's manner. There was a new seriousness in the way he dealt with Ki-jo. Jacob had begun treating him like a man of the same trade.
"The truth is, RCA regards the radio business as a declining industry. Radio is a fine medium, but we've judged that its life is running out."
"Because of television?"
"That's right."
"Then the work you're doing at the Japan branch must be less about the radio business than about surveying Japan's television market and industry."
"How did you know?"
"Because electronics is a business of looking ahead. Television is black-and-white for now, but color sets will come, and in the future there will be televisions as flat as a picture frame."
As Ki-jo went on calling shot after shot and laying out the future of the television industry, a glint of admiration flickered through Jacob's eyes.
RCA was already, in 1953, developing the NTSC system, the standard for color television. It was the most advanced technology of the day, and ordinary people who knew of it were vanishingly few.
Sensing Jacob's gaze turn favorable, Ki-jo judged that the chances of closing the deal were rising.
He had asked Frank to bring in a man from RCA because, in the original history, the company had made an abrupt and seemingly unaccountable push into Korea. In 1956, RCA would jointly establish HLKZ-TV, the first television station in the country.
It was an age when hardly anyone in Korea had seen a television, and few even knew such a thing existed. A set was a machine only the tiniest sliver of the upper class could enjoy—and yet RCA brought in state-of-the-art broadcasting equipment fresh off American production lines. Equipment it had not even sold to Japan.
The newest gear, which no country in Asia possessed, was carried into the poorest nation in Asia, and RCA went so far as to found a broadcasting station in the process. It was on that course of action that Ki-jo had pinned his hopes. If RCA was willing to build a station and install cutting-edge television equipment, might it not also be willing to throw Korea at least a subcontract for vacuum-tube radios? He had held that hope.
He asked whether RCA could establish a subcontracting operation in Korea, just as Zenith had given subcontract production to Japan.
Jacob's answer came back.
"Entrusting subcontract work to Korea would be difficult. If RCA had wanted to bring prices down, we would have set up a subcontract factory in Japan first."
Ki-jo nodded. Even he thought a Korean subcontract would be hard to justify. There was the risk of war, and the country lacked the most basic industrial infrastructure, a stable supply of electric power among it. It was the answer he had fully expected.
And so he decided to show them what he had actually prepared.
He drew a sheet of paper from inside his coat and spread it on the table. Jacob and Frank studied the drawing he had brought.
"What is this?" Frank asked.
Jacob, though, understood at a glance what Ki-jo had drawn.
"It resembles a conceptual diagram of cable television broadcasting."
"That's right."
Ki-jo nodded. The United States, its territory so vast that areas of poor reception were everywhere, had been running cable broadcasts since the late 1940s. And Jacob was a man from America's foremost maker of television and radio broadcasting equipment. Ki-jo had known he would understand the drawing.
What he had sketched was a schematic: radio waves entering through an antenna, passing through an amplifier, and traveling by wire to a speaker in each home. It worked on the same principle as a school broadcasting club putting on music and having it come out of the speaker in every classroom. Ki-jo's company would receive the radio signal and send it, by wire, to any household that subscribed to a listening service.
At home, when you wanted to hear the radio, you had only to switch on a speaker shaped like one. Subscribe to a service of that kind, and there was no need to buy a radio that cost more than a year's wages.
"I've been commissioned by the U.S. Information Service to take charge of a radio-distribution project in Korea. Mr. Frank, beside me, is the embassy officer overseeing that work."
"I see."
"The trouble is that spreading radios in Korea is a difficult business. Import a finished set from abroad and the steep tariffs hammer you. Try to build radios here, and there's no technology for making the parts. Import the parts and assemble them, and the duties still leave you with no way forward. And even in that environment, the government keeps urging people to manufacture domestic radios."
"Then why did you say you wanted to take on subcontract work for RCA?"
"I thought that if we built an RCA subcontract factory in Korea and laid before the government a plan to export most of what we produced, we might get the tariffs brought down. The argument would be that the parts were imported to make goods for sale overseas, so there was no reason to levy a duty on them."
"As in Japan."
"Exactly."
Besides the wired-radio business, Ki-jo also told them of another scheme he had once considered.
"For a time I looked at producing an ultra-cheap radio that could receive only a single frequency. Take out the components that catch multiple frequencies, and the price of a radio drops sharply."
"That's true. You could cut the manufacturing cost dramatically that way."
Jacob granted the point. This time Ki-jo turned to Frank.
"The U.S. Information Service only wants Koreans listening to one channel, or two at most, doesn't it?"
Frank nodded.
What the Korean government and the United States wanted, in the end, was for the Korean people to listen to KBS or to VOA, the Voice of America. Distributing radios had never been about anything but instilling anti-communist thought and propaganda for the system.
"But Koreans set their sights higher than either of you thinks. Even when they own nothing, if they're going to buy a luxury at all, they want the very best. They won't care for a radio that plays only one channel. They may not understand English, but they'll want the American military broadcasts as well, and they'll only be satisfied if Japanese stations come in too."
When he had finished, Jacob asked.
"So you've pointed the business toward raising a receiving antenna in each neighborhood, taking in the broadcasts, and then sending that signal by wire to every home?"
"Yes. Vice President, if you'll let me have RCA antennas, receivers, and high-output amplifiers at a low price, I'll set them up across the country and try my hand at a wired-radio business."
"And why should I have to give them to you cheaply?"
"Because it's the cheapest way to stick it to Zenith."
The answer seemed to please him. Jacob broke into a hearty laugh.
While he was still laughing, Ki-jo turned to Frank.
"Mr. Frank, wouldn't it be more effective to put a cheap speaker in every home than to distribute expensive radios? The essence of a radio-distribution project is, in the end, getting the sound that comes out of a radio into the ears of more people, isn't it?"
"That's true."
The plan struck Frank as sound. He found himself wondering why neither the American government nor he himself had thought of Ki-jo's idea long before. He was still admiring it when Ki-jo suddenly came at him hard.
"Mr. Frank, I know the United States has already tried twice to distribute radios in Korea, and failed both times. When you entrusted a project like that to me, you knew the odds of failure were high, didn't you?"
Caught off guard, Frank flushed bright red.
"Ah, that... I thought that if it was you, you might be able to make a success of it."
"Ha ha ha. I'm grateful you rate me so highly, but even I can't distribute radios under Korea's circumstances as they stand. It's impossible."
As Ki-jo pressed him, Jacob cut in.
"Hold on. Mr. Lee, I haven't said I'll supply RCA equipment cheaply."
"You'd rather watch Zenith strut around Korea?"
"Ha ha ha, I'm joking. I absolutely cannot stand to watch Zenith do well."
From the moment he had seen Jacob's face harden in the radio shop, Ki-jo had been fairly certain that some measure of cooperation would follow. Believing they had found common cause, he said:
"Mr. Jacob, there's something I'd like to say to you, as a man who represents an American electronics company."
"What is it? Please, go ahead."
Having taken the measure of Ki-jo's grasp of the industry, Jacob gave him his full attention.
"Understood. I'll look into the Japanese companies again."
"You really do need to look again. Pay particular attention to a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo."
The firm Ki-jo had singled out would play its part in bringing RCA down. His warning would show itself as reality before long.
Soon the world's first commercial transistor radio would be born in the United States, but a mere ten months later Japan would be producing transistor radios of its own—a model called the SONY TR-55, made by Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. When that radio sold in America as if it had grown wings, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo would change its very name to that of the product: Sony.
Ki-jo tried to imagine how Jacob would feel on the day he saw the warning confirmed with his own eyes. But the warning had not yet struck Jacob as anything real, and the man only laughed.
Ki-jo shook his hand. Frank watched the two of them with a look of quiet satisfaction.
He had taken a solid hit, called out for deliberately handing Ki-jo an impossible task, but the sight of the man breaking through the impasse with a stroke of ingenuity only deepened his faith. Ki-jo had shattered the assumption that what had to be distributed was the radio itself. A radio cost too much, so why not deliver only its essence—the sound? There was no need to test him any further. Frank made up his mind to back Ki-jo's MSG business.
"Oh—but isn't a wired-radio business illegal in Korea? Is there no regulation covering it?"
Jacob, still in the middle of shaking Ki-jo's hand, asked as if the thought had only just occurred to him.
Ki-jo answered, "No."
Law existed only within the bounds of what human beings could imagine. What could not be imagined had no regulation attached to it.
In the Republic of Korea, the Wired Broadcast Reception Management Act would not be enacted until 1961. Only after television broadcasting began in earnest, and the country ran up against the reality of vast areas where the signal would not reach, were wired-broadcast operators placed under a notification system as a way of curing poor reception. Anyone who simply filed a report could run a wired broadcast, and through the 1980s small local operators sprang up in every region, thick as bamboo shoots after rain.
Then, in 1991, the Comprehensive Cable Broadcasting Act was passed, and the retransmission of wired broadcasts was no longer something just anyone could do.
For now, the radio waves traveling the skies over the Republic of Korea were free. It was a time when you could receive them and sell them, and nothing was amiss.