[Reporter`s view] Cell phones use mocks road fatalities

The name given to telephone when it was introduced into the country for the first time was Toknyulpung -- an odd-sounding transliteration of the English word ¡°telephone¡± that originated from the Greek words ¡®tele,¡¯ meaning distant, and ¡®phone,¡¯ meaning sound. Used first inside the royal palace as the modern means of communication in 1898, it came to link the capital city of Seoul with the southernmost port city of Pusan. The cost was enormous, and its widespread use was very slow in coming.

Until the 1970s telephones were scarce possessions of only a few members of the privileged class, as in most other countries. The gadget was as much coveted and cherished as the piano and automobile.

The development and adoption of the time division exchange (TDX) switchboard in the 1980s led to a stunning revolution of mass communication. Rapidly multiplying numbers of telephones and drastically improved quality of sound transmission caught up with many advanced nations.

The advent of mobile telephones and the Internet brought about an additional quantum leap during the 1990s. Subscribers to cell phones at the end of 1999 accounted for about half of the entire population, outstripping Japan (44.9 percent) and ranking Korea seventh among the members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It put Korea ahead of the United States and France in subscription rate. The ratio of Internet access also outpaced Japan and the United Kingdom.

Automobiles arrived at about the same time as telephones. Photos of the telephone, an Ericsson model, and the automobile, a Cadillac with a 4-cylinder engine, used by King Kojong show their concurrent introduction into the country. There were only a few imported cars during the first half-century since their introduction.

Following the end of World War II through the period of armed conflict with North Korea, Koreans gradually acquired skills to repair second-hand imported automobiles and assemble crude cars, then manufacture their own domestically developed models. Big carmakers like Hyundai, Daewoo and Kia came into being to export their products.

In the 1970s the number of registered cars was about 126,000; today 23 out of 100 people own a car -- one in every four driving one.

No less remarkable has been the increasing number of traffic fatalities. Out of 1 million populations, 194 are killed in road accidents each year, the second highest rate in the world, next only to Greece with 21l fatalities. In auto production (2,840,000 a year) Korea still lags far behind many industrialized countries, including the United States and Japan, and ranks seventh in the world.

The large number of traffic deaths is sufficient enough to put Koreans to shame. They swagger about with their cell phones and might as well swagger about the pathetically high rate of road fatalities.