Land's Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It

By Peter C. Weinberg and Peter C. Wensberg

Book Overview

The unauthorized story of the enigmatic man who created a world-class organization in his own image and then lost control of it. 24 pages of photographs. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395421144
• ISBN13: 9780395421147
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 258 Pages
• Weight: 1.43 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Photographic memories

This is the story of a creative genius, his unorthodox approach to science and business, and the singular company that grew from his vision, told by a writer who worked for and with Edwin Land over two and a half decades. While many folks (instantly) recognize the name Polaroid, fewer remember the inventor of artificial polarizers and instant photography, fewer still that Land ranks second only to Edison in patents granted. Wensberg's tale grows from Land's earliest research -- carried on sub rosa in Columbia University labs by the expedient nighttime use of fire escapes and unlocked windows -- to the triumphant defeat of Kodak, sixty years later, in patent litigation that froze the film giant's instant photo effort like a mammoth pushed into a glacial crevasse. Along the way he describes a company that embraced affirmative action a decade before the Federal government considered the idea, designed factory machinery with an eye to the pleasure of the intended operator, and let every employee participate in the self-invention of an industry.

The not instant story of instant photography

Across America and the developed world the name Polaroid remains familiar. Over a certain age the product identification of Polaroid Land Camera has recognition. But among that older group, probably not one in ten will know that the Land part of the product name was the name of the man who invented the cameras. More to the point, the man who envisioned the concept of instant photography and worked for decades to invent instant film. Who founded a company during the Depression unlike any other in America. Who was second only to Edison in the number of patents he held. Who was a true American icon. Edwin Land played a large part in his own anonymity. He valued his individual privacy only slightly less than his family's, about which he was adamant. He sought the limelight, or at least accepted it, only to promote his inventions at crucial moments. Peter Wensberg tells this sometimes technical story with the skill of a novelist, with a structure that evokes from the reader a genuine excitement about a man who not so much discovered the future as he did imagine it, and then invented it. Wensberg compellingly gets us inside Land, to whatever extent that was possible, to illustrate a true genius driven to go forward, leaving behind the beaten path, or indeed any path at all. In Land we see the familiar pattern of genius, of people like Linus Pauling or Richard Feynman - an early identification of their quest, a self confidence both underlying and overriding, and the implicit knowledge that the quest will not be had within convention. Just as important, Wensberg gives an account of Land's technology that illustrates the decades of hard work that go into the consumer technologies we take for granted. Land, though often reticent and inaccessible, inspired men, and very early on women. He caused people to leave good jobs for the opportunity to work for his unique company. He got from people far more than they thought they could give, and often in an astonishingly short time. Land pioneered fair wages and equal treatment at a time when people would take any job at any pay under any conditions. His defense work in World War II saved countless lives. He committed his company to diversity long before that notion reached a level of political necessity. This is a story about an American at his best.