Land, Edwin Herbert

(b. 7 May 1909 in Bridgeport, Connecticut; d. 1 March 1991 in Cambridge, Massachusetts), inventor of instant photography and the plastic sheet polarizer, founder of the Polaroid Corporation, scientific researcher on color vision, and confidential U.S. government adviser on spy planes and satellites from the 1950s onward.

Land was one of two children of Matha Goldfaden and Harry M. Land, a scrap-metal dealer and real-estate investor whose Jewish parents had fled persecution in tsarist Russia. Young Edwin and his family settled in Norwich, Connecticut, after World War I. His older sister, Helen, pronounced his name “Din,” creating Land’s lifelong nickname.

Land was fascinated by science, particularly optics, from childhood. He first encountered light polarizers at the age of thirteen at a Connecticut summer camp named Mooween. A major influence was the textbook Physical Optics, by Robert W. Wood of Johns Hopkins University (whom Land finally met in the 1930s). Land graduated from Norwich Academy in 1926, having already pushed far beyond what his high school physics instructor could teach him. He attended Harvard for only a semester, then moved to New York City to begin experiments in optics.

During more than two years in the city, studying intensely at the New York Public Library and experimenting in various Manhattan basements, Land succeeded in making a plastic sheet polarizer with billions of tiny crystals per square inch. This device was suitable for automobile headlights, visors, and windshields, to control nighttime glare and improve visibility. Until that time polarizers of light, used for nearly a century for basic scientific research, were made of expensive crystals like calcite or tourmaline. When Land returned to Harvard in 1929, after applying for the first of 535 U.S. patents, the physics department gave him his own laboratory in which to perfect his invention. On 10 November 1929 Land married Helen (Terre) Maislen of Hartford, Connecticut; the couple had two daughters.

After describing the sheet polarizer at a physics department seminar in 1932, Land again left Harvard, still without a degree, in order to go into the business of making and selling the polarizers he had invented. This enterprise evolved into the Polaroid Corporation in 1937. The company expanded rapidly during World War II, drawing on its pioneering in polarizers to develop and manufacture devices that would cut battlefield glare, improve the accuracy of gun-aiming at night, and maintain the night vision of pilots and sailors. As a diversion from this intense work, and to prepare for peacetime, he led the team that developed one-step, or instant, photography. This was first demonstrated publicly at a meeting of the Optical Society of America in 1947 and placed on the market in 1948. The invention of instant photography, at first delivering pictures in sixty seconds, emerged just as the major U.S. automakers were deciding against installing Land’s polarizer system in new cars. Polarizers would, however, become essential to such products as sunglasses, windows, and displays for digital watches and calculators.

Before he was forty years old, Land had launched two entire industries, sheet polarizers and instant photography. The first was destined for niche markets, the other for mass consumers. With the protection of hundreds of patents, Land led Polaroid’s development of successive generations of instant photography. The first photographs were in sepia. Black-and-white followed in 1950. Land and his team continually made the film more sensitive, so that by 1959, Polaroid marketed a variety that could take indoor sports pictures without a flash and deliver a print in fifteen seconds. Color went on the market in 1963, followed in 1972 by an entirely new system, called SX-70, in which the positive and negative were not peeled apart. Resembling a large playing card, SX-70 pictures allowed the customer to see the images “emerge” before their eyes. This basic technology was still in use thirty years later. The convenience of even the first instant photography led to sales of hundreds of thousands of cameras within a few years. The company grew so fast that it was the archetypal science-based industry of its day. Sales multiplied almost 200 times between 1950 and 1970. The reaction on Wall Street was to bid the price of Polaroid shares to ninety times earnings, a record at the time. But only a few years later, amid the struggle to introduce SX-70, Wall Street reversed its judgment and slashed the stock price 90 percent in about a year.

Land devoted little of his time to conventional corporate management, which he left to others, preferring to operate in his lab in an old brick building at Main and Osborn Streets in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During his more than sixty years in the laboratory, in which projects eventually grew to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, Land worked with small groups of collaborating researchers. He recruited and challenged them with such a torrent of new ideas that his coworkers often hoped that his attention would shift elsewhere. But they also found that when they got stuck, they could spend hours with him and go away with new ways to crack the nut.

To keep Polaroid from being swallowed up in a world of such giants as Eastman Kodak, Land not only emphasized patents but also imposed a culture of general secrecy. His concern with secrecy made him an ideal adviser to President Eisenhower and his successors on the subject of obtaining overhead photographs of the missiles and aircraft of the Soviet Union. Reconnaissance information was vital not only for finding targets or warning of dangers but also for obtaining information about the true strength of the Soviet military. This information, in turn, allowed the United States to rein in its own military development during the cold war, and also to monitor, in great detail, compliance with disarmament treaties. As with his instant-photography coworkers, Land often was called on to resolve seemingly impossible technical problems. His usual response was to give the engineers and scientists long lists of things to try. The effect was to restore optimism.

Although Land preferred to remain out of the public eye—he almost never appeared on television, for instance—he frequently spoke to the press and in smaller venues. Of medium height, with a shock of black hair parted on the right and penetrating dark eyes, the shy Land trained himself to be a dramatic public speaker and demonstrator before employees, shareholders, scientists, and officials. He was a fanatic experimentalist. He enjoyed every one of the hundreds or thousands of steps along a pathway—with a goal he spelled out in advance—to create “something well worth having.” In 1963 he told a reporter for Life magazine that “every creative act is a sudden cessation of stupidity.” But he was not merely an empiricist, trying one thing after another. In 1980 he declared, “We use bull’s-eye empiricism: we try everything, but we try the right thing first!”

Land knew decades of success, but the spectacular failure of an instant movie system Polaroid introduced in the late 1970s ended his leadership of the company he founded. When Land stepped down as chairman of Polaroid in 1980 under pressure from his board of directors, he defiantly maintained from the stage of Symphony Hall in Boston that the most valuable equity is ideas and shared competences that are built up in carrying out one innovation after another, in a world where one must innovate or die.

He received many honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963) and the National Medals of both Science (1968) and Technology (1988); he was inducted in 1977 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Land and his wife used much of their wealth in large and small philanthropies, including many millions for three projects in Cambridge: a science building at Harvard, the House of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Rowland Institute for Science on the Charles River. With gifts to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he pushed to increase the amount of time college students spent doing experiments, starting in their freshman year. Land died at the age of eighty-one. He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

More than a half century after his invention of the plastic sheet polarizer, Edwin Land remained a symbol of restless innovation. When he started out as a youth in the 1920s, it was often said that the frontier was closed. But Land defied the big companies and the notion that the heroic inventor had disappeared. Almost alone, he lived the innovator’s high-wire life. He was determined to use science for unexpected, significant new things that thousands or millions would use, thereby launching viable businesses. Thanks to Land’s unquenchable energy, millions of people all over the world had the fun of looking at photographs they had just taken, of people and places and events they were enjoying. Skilled in convincing huge numbers of people that innovation could be useful and pleasant, he was ready to walk through the minefields of finance, patents, and public relations, knowing that once an invention is born, the next must already be underway.

For an overview of Land’s published work, see Mary McCann, ed., Edwin H. Land’s Essays, 2 vols. (1993), especially “Polaroid and the Headlight Problem,” which was his first published article; “Basic Research in the Small Company,” dating from 1946; “A New One-Step Photographic Process,” a 1947 article that describes the development of instant photography; and “The Retinex Theory of Color Vision,” which spells out his evolving ideas on this subject. A full biography is Victor K. McElheny, Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land, Inventor of Instant Photography (1998). Accounts of Land’s career also appear in Francis Bello, “The Magic That Made Polaroid,” Fortune (Apr. 1959); Philip Siekman, “Kodak and Polaroid: An End to Peaceful Co-existence,” Fortune (Nov. 1970); and Sean Callahan, “If You Are Able To State a Problem, It Can Be Solved,” Life (27 Oct. 1972). An obituary is in the New York Times (2 Mar. 1991).

Victor K. McElheny