Fierstein says that Land had one special interest as a teenager and that was finding a way to remove the glare from automobile headlights – a big safety problem back in the 1930s. Price: Edwin Land was born in Connecticut in 1909, and as a child had an insatiable curiosity about light and how it was manipulated in devices such as stereoscopes and kaleidoscopes. I always thought it referred to the ground like they were trying to distinguish that from an aerial camera or an underwater camera. Well, this is a major battle and I didn’t realize until I got involved in that, that when you look at a Polaroid camera and it said Polaroid Land camera, I didn’t know that Land referred to a person. We’re all familiar with Polaroid cameras where they would shoot out a picture and you would have a print in your hand within a minute or so. And it was that “patent war” that first brought Land’s accomplishments to the author’s attention.įierstein: When I was a young lawyer, I was on a team of lawyers at a New York law firm called Fish & Neave that represented Polaroid, and they were representing Polaroid in a major intellectual property battle with Eastman Kodak over the technology involved in instant photography or one-step photography. Price: That’s Ron Fierstein, and he wanted the world to hear about the amazing man and his groundbreaking inventions, so he wrote about them in his the book A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War. Ron Fierstein: It turns out that Edwin Land was the father of the technology, the founder of Polaroid, and the more I learned about him, the more amazed I was that he was this unbelievably important American inventor and technologist, and so few people, including myself, had ever heard of him. His name was Edwin Land, and his company was Polaroid. It wasn’t that long ago, however, that the desire for “instant” photography led a young inventor to create a camera and film technology that would satisfy that need for speed. With pictures instantly available on a digital device – and passed around on the Internet almost as fast, the need for film and processing has moved from the mainstream into the niche market of artists and hobbyists. It used to be that the tradition of taking family photos was saved for special events, and the call to “say cheese!” was heard mainly during the holidays and in front of Mt. Gary Price: Everywhere you look these days, people are taking photographs with their tablets, laptops, digital cameras, and – mostly – their phones. A minute might feel like a long time to wait for what is ostensibly an instant photo but it was orders of magnitude faster than the existing photo development infrastructure at the time.15-34 A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land and Polaroid Those chemicals took about a minute to develop the photo before the layers could be peeled apart and the image revealed. As the sheets pressed together, development chemicals were pressed between the layers. An exterior knob turned a pair of interior rollers which pushed the sheets together before expelling them from the camera. Polaroid's first instant camera, the Land Camera Model 95, held two sheets of photo paper at opposite ends of the interior camera body. Despite having a relatively high price tag of about $90, every one of those cameras sold on the first day (via the Photographic Society of Northwest Arkansas). A small initial run of only 50 cameras was produced and stocked at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston. A year later the camera was on sale to the public, just in time for Christmas 1948.

Edwin land contribution to photography