career. Chul Wan had gotten hold of a small shopping bag’s worth of Note
7s and was attempting to re-create the fires at home. He pored over the
YouTube videos and studied the testimony of the victims, whose stories
were full of clues as they recounted the immolations step by step. The
public materials were still too scant to conclude exactly what the culprit
was—smartphones are incredibly complex, and hundreds of thousands of
phones would ideally need to be laboratory tested to establish the true
cause—but he had reason to challenge what he thought was Samsung’s
hasty conclusion.
CEO Koh’s error, he thought, was blaming a single component.
“Big mistake,” Chul Wan told us. He believed that the interactions of
hundreds of pieces of circuitry, parts, architecture, and even software code
could have caused a malfunction somewhere and ignited the phones. He
published his hypothesis in his column and expounded on it at our table.
“This is the most complex Samsung phone ever made. You can’t
assign these explosions to one component alone,” he said. “In the chase to
beat Apple, it looks like Samsung crammed the Note 7 with features until
it became uncontrollable.”
There were inconsistencies in Samsung’s claims that stuck out to Chul
Wan, and one was glaring.
“Usually, when there’s a battery short circuit, it’s a short blast, a very
short, intense fire,” Chul Wan said. “This was a much longer process”—
with the phone heating up for about thirty seconds before igniting into a
long, drawn-out burn, discoloring the screen.
“Journalists,” he said, “called me and told me that Samsung asked
them not to quote me.” But behind the scenes, people in the Tower were
starting to listen.
“We’re also observing Professor Park Chul Wan. Some parts of his
recent writing are very persuasive,” a powerful staffer named Lee Soo-
hyung at the Future Strategy Office wrote to another Samsung executive in
a text message, forwarded to Chul Wan.
He showed us another message from an industry colleague. “According
to an acquaintance I met at my home today, [Samsung SDI] is busy
looking for a sacrificial lamb....The quality control team even suggested
seeking your advice, but apparently [the higher-ups] are ignoring it.”
Clearly a lot was at stake here, and no one wanted to take the blame.