Polaroid camera

The connection between Polaroid glasses and a Polaroid camera

Edwin Land (Bridgeport, Connecticut, May 7, 1909 – Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 1, 1991)

Edwin Land, the son of a scrap dealer, had his first inspiration when he was seventeen. He attended Harvard University and had taken a weekend off to visit New York.

Walking down Broadway with his friends, he was overwhelmed by the sea of light from the neon signs, the movie theaters and the blinding headlights of the cars. In a flash he thought that you should be able to undo that blindness.

Light consists of waves that vibrate in all directions. With certain crystals you can channel it, vibrate it in one direction, in one plane, i.e. polarize it.

By the age of nineteen he had already invented plastic sheets in which the crystals were hidden, had the sheets fabricated, called them 'polaroids' and immediately patented them.
Edwin Land was too impatient to study, so he dropped out of Harvard and dove into the New York Public Library to read everything that had ever been written on his subject. Together with a friend he founded his first company in 1932 - 23 years old.

He initially intended his polarizing material for car headlights, but the Detroit auto industry saw no point in it and thought the technology was too expensive.

An acquaintance went fishing one day and brought such a Polaroid sheet. He returned excitedly. He had caught a giant trout and told Land that the Polaroid sheet allowed you to see right through the reflection of the light on the lake, so you could keep a close eye on the trout. The resulting polaroid glasses were initially only available in outdoor shops. As polaroid sunglasses, they quickly became popular with a wider audience. The application possibilities of the Polaroid system turned out to be endless. Country made a good living.

Before and during the Second World War, he also designed new optical techniques for aerial photography for the army with his Polaroid Corporation. It was with Land's 'vectography' that the French coast was studied for the Normandy landings.

Optics from Land – now appointed science adviser to President Eisenhower – were in the infamous U2 spy planes after the war, later in spy satellites.

Very early on, his company was also known for its unbiased policy towards female and colored personnel.

In 1944 he vacationed in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife and child. He says he took a picture of a pack mule with firewood, an Indian woman who sold jewelry and one of his three-year-old daughter Jennifer.

The girl started whining because she couldn't see her picture right away. Land about that: 'During a walk in the most charming Santa Fe, I saw the device completely in front of me in a flash.

In an hour I knew what the instant camera would look like, how the film would work and how to solve the problem chemically.

Excited, I immediately drove to the lawyer who defended my patents.' In the word polaroid camera, polaroid only stands for the brand name of the company, not for the technology.

Camera with built-in darkroom

You couldn't compare the Polaroid Land Camera with any other camera. The roll of film consisted of three elements: the negative on one spool, the positive photographic paper on the other, and eight bags of viscous developer.

After printing you had to keep turning, so that two rollers broke the bags and pressed the positive and negative together. After one minute you could open the camera and the photographer had to pull the negative from the positive. In short: the darkroom was in the camera.

In November 1948, the first instant camera came on the market through a department store in Boston: together with the film it weighed two and a half kilograms. You could take eight sepia-colored shots with it, the development time took 60 seconds and most importantly: the device cost no more than $ 89.75.

It became a worldwide sales success. Land later: 'I knew the plane shouldn't cost a hundred dollars. I didn't feel like making something just for rich people.'

In 1982, aged 73, 'Mr. Polaroid' retired and he promptly founded a new research institute, which still exists today. 'Now I finally have time to make new inventions', said the old boss, 'As a scientific researcher you don't want to retire, you just want an extra 500 years.' When he died in 1991 he had 537 patents to his name, only Thomas Edison did better with 1097. The autodidact, who had turned his back on university as a young man, had by then been awarded 20 honorary doctorates. Also by his own Harvard University, which he had left early.

In the sixty years of its existence, the Polaroid camera acquired a real cult status, and not only because well-known artists such as Andy Warhol, Chuck Close and Luc Tuymans made extensive use of it. Photographers of name and fame used and still use the camera to do a test.

No wonder that as the digital camera made the instant photo disappear from the scene, the nostalgia increased, and the rescues became more numerous. Polaroid websites are now legion.

The erotic magazine Tickl is also being published, which tries to recapture 'the playful, sneaky bedroom feeling from the early days of the Polaroid'.

The American Dave Bias and the Austrian Florian Kaps are the best known names in the save polaroid community. Kaps is also responsible for restarting the closed Polaroid factory in Enschede in 2009, where 1200 people once worked.

The new, small factory aims to produce 4 to 5 million Polaroid film packs per year. Admittedly under the provocative name 'Impossible'.

Polaroid camera

The American Polaroid – the company has finally put away the Polaroid camera – came into the hands of successive investment companies after Land's death, including the illustrious Tom Petters.

And year after year it brings digital products to the market, such as an LCD television and the PoGo, a pocket printer for printing digital photos from a mobile phone – without ink – anywhere. It could have been an Edwin Land idea.

Even a digital camera with a built-in printer is in the works. In April 2009, an American venture investor simply bought the company at auction. For 50 million dollars.

Dave Bias and Florian Kaps know that they have to count on themselves and the many fans of 'the medium of melancholy': 'Polaroid photos fade and fade so tenderly, just like your memory of the person portrayed.'

(See also: roll film)