Summary of Dr Edwin Land

Hi, I write summaries about influential world-class performers in a different and interesting format.

I talk about 1 story, 2 quotes and 3 learnings from that person.

In this post, I am writing about Dr Edwin Land so allow me to give a brief about him before I share 1 interesting story, 2 quotes to think about and 3 short lessons about him for you to read this week.

Edwin H. Land (1909–1991) was the innovative inventor responsible for conceiving of and perfecting instant photography. Known simply as Polaroid, the system revolutionized traditional photography by compressing darkroom processes into an integrated film unit and producing a final photograph in the seconds following the click of a camera shutter.

1 STORY FOR YOU

Edwin Land and polarized light

At age 17, Land enrolled at Harvard. A few months later he left, bored of being surrounded by wealthy kids with no ambition. Land moved to New York City and convinced his sceptical father to continue his allowance while he pursued his dream (as part of the bargain, he agreed to enrol for a semester at New York University). He rented a room just outside Times Square, set up a small lab in the basement, and began working round the clock on his idea.

Years later, Land said, “There’s a rule they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School: if anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing to excess.” He persisted but had no luck with his polarizer idea. In the face of impossible challenges, where do you go? Library! Land pored through every book on optics he could find, frequently with a young research assistant he had hired named Helen (Terre) Maisler, finally Land found a clue in the back of an old book.

Sick dogs that were fed quinine to treat parasites showed an unusual type of crystal in their urine. Those microscopic crystals, called herapthite, turned out to be the highest-quality polarizers ever discovered. Scientists had tried for decades, starting in the mid-nineteenth century to grow the crystals and make useful polarizers out of them. But failed — the tiny crystals are impossibly fragile — and the field eventually gave up.

Land came up with a crazy idea: embed millions of those tiny crystals into some kind of goo (he used a nitrocellulose lacquer) and find a way to get them to line up. After a handful of failures, Land decided to try using a magnetic field to line them up, like a magnet can align small iron fillings. He knew of a high-powered magnet at a physics lab at Columbia University. Since he wasn’t a student and had no privileges at the university, Land snuck into the building, climbed out onto a sixth-floor ledge, and entered the lab through a window. Land had placed a thin layer of his dark crystal-goo mix inside a plastic cell the size of a quarter. As soon as he placed that cell near the magnet, the dark cell turned transparent. The magnet had done the trick — it aligned the miniature crystals, allowing light to shine through polarized light. Millions of miniature Millennium Falcons streaked toward the plastic cell, but only vertically angled ones could slip through.

It was, he said later, “the most exciting single event in my life.” He had created the first man-made polarizer. He was 19 years old. The following year, Land returned to Harvard. Two months later, he married Terre. He now had access to a lab — but Terre didn’t; women at that time were not allowed in labs. So Land would sneak Terre into the physics lab to help him with his experiments. Once again, after a short stint, Land grew restless. Within two years, he abandoned the academic world to start what would soon be known as the Polaroid Corporation.

2 QUOTES FROM HIM

My motto is very personal and may not fit anyone else or any other company. It is- Don’t do anything that someone else can do. Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.

— Edwin H. Land, Forbes magazine, May 4, 1987

The test of an invention is the power of an inventor to push it through in the face of staunch — not opposition, but indifference — in society.

— Book (Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land)

3 LEARNINGS FOR YOU

1. Business should be at the intersection of art and science.

This extended to everything that Land did at Polaroid, including how he crafted the products, advertising and corporate culture.

2. Delivering Innovation with perfection

Observers have pointed out that Edwin used to believe in scientific demonstration which was not just intriguing but also addictive. In the 60s, Edwin used to turn Polaroid’s shareholders’ meetings into dramatic showcases for whatever line the company was about to introduce. He would create extraordinary settings, take the product in hand, run the slides in the background and created magic with his explanations. He was not any sort of typical salesman.

3. Cross-disciplinary curiosity

Alongside, Land’s scientific passions lay knowledge of art, music and literature. He was a cultured person, growing even more so as he got older, and his interests filtered into the ethos of Polaroid. His company took powerful pride in its relationship to fine artists, its sponsorship of public television, even its superior graphic design. He liked people who had breadth as well as depth — chemists who were also musicians or photographers who understood physics

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