The Invention and Success of the First Instant Camera: The Polaroid Land
In 1947, a young Harvard dropout and already accomplished scientist unveiled a brand new creation in front of a public audience. Imagine their surprise when, within fifty seconds of firing the shutter of his invention, he produced a physical portrait of the president of the Optical Society. This young man’s name was Edwin Land.
Before polaroid cameras were invented, SLR cameras made by companies such as Nikon, Canon and Rolleiflex were popular. These cameras used rollfilm, which would have to be brought into a shop to be developed into photographs. This all changed when Edwin Land, co-founder of Land-Wheelwright Laboratories, developed the first instant camera.
Land had dropped out of Harvard University after one year of studying chemistry, and moved to New York City. There, he conducted daily research at the New York Public Library, and used a Columbia University laboratory to experiment with polarizing light. His studies led to several inventions, and eventually he found himself back at Harvard to continue studies in chemistry and physics. In 1932, he co-founded Land-Wheelwright Laboratories with one of his professors, based in Cambridge. The company would later be renamed “Polaroid Corporation” in 1937.
The technology he developed was used in a wide range of applications, such as the production of sunglasses and colour animation. During World War Two, Land and his team refined night-vision goggles; a viewing system called the Vectograph, which revealed enemy camouflage; and later, the U-2 spy plane.
His most notable invention, however, was of course the instant camera. The inspiration came to him from his three-year-old daughter, who was upset that it would be weeks before she could see the pictures her father was taking in the park one day.
This spurred Land to challenge himself and Polaroid Co. to build a photographic system, with a revolutionary camera and film combination, that would allow images to be viewed immediately after being taken. His goal was to invent “one-step photography.” Land developed a device originally known as the “Land camera”and publicly demonstrated it’s process on February 21, 1947. The camera contained a roll of positive paper with a pod of developing chemicals at the top of each frame. After firing the camera and turning a knob, exposed negative and paper were forced through rollers, which spread the reagents from the pod evenly between the two layers as they were pushed out of the camera. A paper cutter within the camera trimmed the paper and, after sixty seconds or less, the layers could be peeled apart to reveal the black-and-white photo.
After Land was featured in several newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times the day after his demonstration and Life Magazine the following week, the cameras had gained popularity and recognition. The reaction from the press was enthusiastic. “There is nothing like this in the history of photography,” The New York Times reported. The Boston Globe wrote that the one-step camera “appealed to Americans’ innate love for instant gratification.”
The release of the cameras was highly anticipated, but Land and his team weren’t ready. It took them almost two years to mass produce the cameras. Land turned to his friends at Kodak, who he had worked with before, as well as borrowed the processing chemicals for his prototype from. They agreed to manufacture the negative, that Polaroid would then integrate with its own image-receiving sheets.
The cameras became available to the public on November 26, 1948. They were on sale for $89.75 (about $886 today), with the film being sold for $1.75 (about $17) at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston. At this time, only 50 cameras could be manufactured, and the film was also in very short supply. However, there was a lot pressure from consumers and the press to release the camera for the Christmas season. They were an instant success, and sold out in one day.
In that first year, the camera made over $5 million in sales, and stayed on the market for the next fifty years.
The Land camera was the prototype for Polaroid cameras for the next 15 years. In 1963, Polacolor film was introduced, enabling the production of colour pictures.
Edwin Land was known to have been an incredibly dedicated scientist and worker, spending long nights in the lab, and a progressive employer, who hired women and minorities for research and management positions. Christopher Bonanos, author of “Instant: The Story of Polaroid,” says that “it was Land who first mixed cutting-edge technology with beauty and design, resulting in wildly popular cameras.” He went on to state that “if the instant camera changed the way we think about photography forever, Land altered our relationship with technology in much the same way. More than that, his company’s early triumphs provided a road map for innovators right up to the present day — most notably the late Steve Jobs, founder of Apple.”
Sources
If you would like to find out more about Edwin Land, there is an informative biography at http://www.biography.com/people/edwin-land-9372429
If you would like to know more about the legacy of instant photography, there is a brief article at http://www.thenational.ae/arts-life/art/polaroid-instantly-changed-photography-and-its-legacy-lives-on
For an informative video on Edwin Land and his other inventions, go to http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21115581
For an overview of Edwin Land’s journey in creating the Polaroid Land camera, with several archival pictures, visit https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2015/01/22/how-polaroid-created-world-need-now-shutterbugs/bQXzgOu4oxV3TzcB0TZlWK/story.html
Other source used: http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4407362/Polaroid-introduces-the-instant-camera--February-21--1947
