neighborhood of Seoul. “They don’t know what’s going on. They’re not a
testing agency. They’re a decision-making body.”
Chul Wan was drawing on his experience in a long career as a battery
detective, with stretches as a government regulator and with the nation’s
battery industry association. He was one of the first Koreans to establish
the country’s industry for lithium ion cellphone batteries.
As a PhD candidate at the prestigious Seoul National University in the
early 1990s, he’d photocopied and collected thousands of dissertations in
Japanese and English—“so many that I forgot to learn English and
Japanese for speaking, only English and Japanese for batteries,” he joked.
His lesson? Establishing causality between a battery, a fire, and the
aftermath is difficult. It’s like going on an arduous hike up a mountain
only to fall on your leg and think you’ve broken it when you’ve actually
fractured your skull.
“In 2007 I was looking into the death of a heavy-machinery operator,”
he recounted. His body was found one winter morning at a construction
site with a charred flip phone in his shirt pocket and burns on his clothing
and flesh. “The media played up the exploding-battery story, the first
documented death from an exploding lithium ion battery in a cellphone.”
The truth, however, came out later that day. Another machinery
operator admitted to accidentally slamming a piece of heavy machinery
into the man’s chest. Unbeknownst to him, the metal had hit the injured
operator right where his phone was placed in his shirt pocket, causing the
battery to explode after the machine operator had fled—and after the
injured man had died.
Chul Wan had spent his career in the obscure world of lithium ion
battery engineering. He dealt not in political gossip but in materials
science.
Overwhelmed with interview requests from his country’s equivalent of
CNN, and penning a popular column in Chosun’s technology magazine, IT
Chosun, he quickly became his country’s loudest rebel and critic, not
always a sound position in the Republic of Samsung.
“A lot of Korean battery experts won’t risk...going up against
Samsung,” he explained to Max and me. “They depend on Samsung for
their careers.”
But, he told me, “you can’t just blame the batteries that easily!” It was
an extraordinary claim that could have easily risked his credibility and