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Edwin Land

1909–1991 · 82 years Tier III

The Harvard dropout who taught cameras to develop themselves

Portrait of Edwin Land — Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer — 1971 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Edwin Land was born May 7, 1909, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of a scrap-metal dealer who had emigrated from Ukraine. He enrolled at Harvard to study physics and left after one year, restless with the pace of formal instruction. Without a lab of his own, he let himself into Columbia University's physics building at night to run experiments on light. He was chasing a way to make cheap polarizing filters, using millions of tiny aligned crystals instead of the huge, difficult single crystals other researchers had tried and failed to grow. He solved it in his twenties, married Helen Maislen in 1929, and in 1932 opened a laboratory with a Harvard physicist, George Wheelwright. He would run it for the next fifty years, on one semester of college.

That laboratory became Polaroid, selling polarizing filters for sunglasses, camera lenses, and 3-D glasses. Land shifted it during the war into military optics: dark-adaptation goggles, target finders, an early smart bomb, and camera systems that later helped photograph Soviet territory from the U-2 spy plane. The idea that made him famous came from his three-year-old daughter, who asked on a family vacation why she could not see a photograph right away. He said he had the answer within the hour, and showed a working instant camera to scientists in February 1947. Every Land Camera in Boston's Jordan Marsh sold out on opening day in 1948. Over four decades he refined the idea into the SX-70, a fully automatic color system, and retired holding 535 patents, behind only Edison and Elihu Thomson.

Polaroid sued Kodak in 1976 for copying the instant-photography patents Land held, and won a decade later: Kodak had to shut down its instant camera line and pay Polaroid more than 900 million dollars, though Land himself had already resigned as chairman by the time the case ended. The company he could not let go of eventually let go of him. Polavision, his instant home-movie system, reached stores in 1977 and failed within two years, and Polaroid's board pushed him out of daily control soon after, ending an unbroken 43 years at the top of the company he had built from a dorm-room idea. Colleagues remembered him working around the clock on hard problems, wearing the same clothes eighteen days running rather than break concentration, while junior researchers worked in relay shifts just to keep pace.

Land spent his last years researching color vision at a small nonprofit institute he founded in Cambridge, working with a London neuroscientist and largely out of public view. He died March 1, 1991, at 81, and his family spent three years shredding his personal papers, honoring what colleagues said was his wish to be remembered for the science and not the biography. Steve Jobs called him a national treasure and modeled Apple's product culture partly on his, especially the instinct to control a technology end to end. Instant film did not survive digital photography: Polaroid stopped making it in 2008, though former employees later revived production under a new name, keeping the chemistry, if not the company, alive.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Edwin Land's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Polarizing filter (Polaroid sheet) invention
Millions of aligned crystals instead of one large, hard-to-grow crystal 1929
Land-Wheelwright Laboratories company
Founded with Harvard physicist George Wheelwright; renamed Polaroid Corporation in 1937 1932
Land Camera invention
The first commercial instant camera; sold out on its opening day 1948
SX-70 invention
Fully automatic integral color instant film system 1972
U-2 reconnaissance camera optics invention
Advised the Eisenhower administration on Cold War aerial photography 1955

Life in brief

with age at each point

1927 aged ~18 Enrolls at Harvard to study physics
1928 aged ~19 Leaves Harvard after one year and begins independent research on light polarization
1929 aged ~20 Marries Helen Maislen
1932 aged ~23 Opens Land-Wheelwright Laboratories with George Wheelwright
February 21, 1947 aged 37 Demonstrates the first instant camera to the Optical Society of America
1948 aged ~39 The Land Camera sells out on its first day at a Boston department store
1972 aged ~63 Introduces the SX-70 integral instant color system
July 27, 1982 aged 73 Resigns as chairman of Polaroid
March 1, 1991 aged 81 Dies in Cambridge, Massachusetts