![]() At once, thinking "Why not?" Land set off on a walk and, in an hour as he recalled, worked out the basics. On vacation in Santa Fe, he photographed his three-year-old daughter, Jennifer, and she asked why she couldn't see the picture right away. It happened because of a dramatic, even romantic, event in 1943. The search for the mechanisms of color vision engaged him from 1955 to the end of his life.Ī prophet of the science-based company so common today, he hit upon an entire new industry: instant photography. He energized and supervised both the U-2 spy plane and its successor satellites, and helped design the mission of NASA. In World War II and again during the Cold War, Land worked on defense problems, most notably reconnaissance. The life that followed the organization of Polaroid was intense and varied, and crammed with honors. Warburg '17 and other Wall Street leaders, the enterprise became Polaroid Corporation. They learned to make reliable, cheap polarizers and sell them for camera filters and sunglasses, and they persuaded investors of the huge potential market for polarizers to control headlight glare and view 3-D movies. They plunged into years of technical agony, mostly in grimy Boston buildings. Then he dropped out again, to found a company with physics instructor George Wheelwright III '25. In 1932, Land became the only undergraduate ever to give a physics department colloquium, and described his polarizer. Returning to Harvard in 1929 to perfect the sheet polarizer, he sufficiently impressed Theodore Lyman, the mandarin of the physics department, that he was given his own lab. Stymied in following a path scientists had trod for 75 years, Land tried the opposite and succeeded. Studying the history of optics in the grand reading room of the New York Public Library, he did experiments in a succession of basement laboratories and at Columbia University. Entering Harvard in 1926, he left after only a few months to pursue his first great invention, plastic sheet polarizers, in the hope that they would conquer headlight glare. Because big companies had settled into established fields, and small companies couldn't afford "scientific prospecting," young men with ideas had difficulty developing them.Įven as a youth, Land chose not to be stifled. In Land's opinion, colleges were not the only institutions stifling young innovators. "If this is preparation for life," Land asked, "where in the world, where in the relationship with our colleagues, where in the industrial domain, where ever again, anywhere in life, is a person given this curious sequence of prepared talks and prepared questions, questions to which the answers are known?" He said that students had to wait too long to meet the first-rate minds, when they needed to begin direct research at once. Just three weeks earlier, in a striking speech at MIT, Land had protested a process that stifled students' drive to "greatness," that is, originality. When he received an honorary degree from Harvard in 1957, 25 years after dropping out of the College for the second time, the scientist-innovator Edwin Land '30 was not glowing with approval of undergraduate education. Photograph courtesy of Polaroid Corporation. Under Land, The Polaroid Corporation became a model company in terms of fair hiring practices, employee relations, and community involvement.ĭuring World War II, he also developed optical and other systems for military use and proposed the retinex theory of color perception, in addition to creating cameras and films that gave instantaneous dry photographs in black and white and color.Land with lens, in a 1943 portrait, surrounded by a "Mondrian" display developed for testing human subjects in his color-vision research. Many applications were found for the Land Camera and improved camera models became available for use in aerial, real estate, and commercial and press photography. In 1948, the Polaroid Land Camera was introduced and became an immediate commercial success. ![]() ![]() The Polaroid Corporation was founded in 1937 it prospered during World War II producing filters for goggles, gunsights, periscopes, range finders, aerial cameras, and the Norden bombsight. He is best remembered for the instant one-step photography made famous by the company he founded, Polaroid Corporation.īorn in Connecticut, Land was educated at Norwich Free Academy and Harvard University. Physicist, manufacturing executive, and inventor Edwin Herbert Land developed the first modern polarizers for light, theories and practices for applications of polarized light, improvements in infrared night-vision instruments, and polarized sunglasses and lenses. ![]()
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