Imagine, if you will, a bright, ambitious young man, entering Harvard University at the age of 17. He went to study chemistry and was fascinated by polarized light, used to research chemical compounds. After a year there, he found himself bored and the established curriculum stifling.
So he quit and went into business with a partner, which rapidly transformed into a technology and manufacturing organization that employed tens of thousands of people.
His firm was fuelled by relentless research and remarkable innovations. He invented products that we didn’t know we wanted and was the first to introduce them in major consumer magazines rather than trade publications. He was a master of marketing.
By the time of his death, he had collected over 500 patents. He was a driven man who worked hard, drove his employees hard and seldom listened to advice from others. But, in the end, he was fired by the firm that he had built.
By now you’re probably thinking I’m talking about Apple’s legendary CEO, Steve Jobs. But despite the parallels, I’m actually talking about Edwin Land, inventor of both polarizing film for sunglasses and the “Picture-in-a-Minute” camera that bore his name – the Polaroid Land Camera.
After leaving Harvard, he moved to New York to continue his research. He realized that instead of making one large polarizing crystal – as was normal at the time – he realized he could line up millions of microscopic crystals in one direction and embed them in a transparent plastic sheet. He was right. And it worked.
He patented his invention, which he called Polaroid Film, in 1929 – the same year as the great stock market crash and start of the Great Depression. He then formed a company with one of his professors, George Wheelright III. Thus, Land-Wheelright Labs were born in 1932.
This new polarizing technology was a huge success, so in 1937 the corporation’s name was changed and the Polaroid Corporation came into being.
In 1943, while on vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his three-year-old daughter Jennifer, he took a picture of her using a film camera of the era. After she asked why she could not see the photo that her father had just taken of her, he began to think.
Within an hour, he'd already had the idea for how an instant film camera might work! Immediately after the trip, he started to research the idea.
To say he was a brilliant researcher would be an understatement. But Land was also a difficult researcher, like a dog with a bone, when he had a problem he could not solve.
Famous (or infamous) for his marathon work sessions, he’d work around the clock. He once wore the same clothes for 18 consecutive days while solving problems with the commercial production of polarizing film, and needed a staff who worked in shifts to bring him food and remind him to eat.
Worse, once he could see the solution to a problem in his head, he lost all motivation to write the solution down or prove his vision to others.
Still, a little more than three years later, on February 21 1947, Land demonstrated an instant camera and associated film to the Optical Society of America. Now called the Polaroid Land Camera, it was put on the market as the Model 95 less than 24 months after that.
Polaroid originally manufactured 60 units of this first camera, with 57 demonstrated at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston before the 1948 Christmas holiday. Its marketers incorrectly guessed that the camera and film would remain in stock long enough to manufacture a second run based on customer demand, but all 57 cameras and all the film sold on the first day
That’s remarkable, given that the camera sold for $89.95 – or about $970 / £710 / AU$1,370 in today's money. A roll of Type 40 film, which produced 8 sepia-toned black-and-white images, sold for $1.75, or about $23.00 / £17 / AU$33 in 2026 money.
The 95 was followed by many models, culminating in the SX-70 series. In April 1970, after years of development and an investment of $600 million, Edwin Land took the stage, pulled a camera from his jacket pocket, unfolded it and took 5 photographs in just 10 seconds. Something previously impossible with a Polaroid camera.
It was said that the S stood for "secret", while the X stood for "experimental". The number 70 was an arbitrary choice "that sounded good."
Land considered the SX-70 his ultimate achievement. It was the culmination of a camera-and-film project to create full-color, self-contained, develop-before-your-eyes, "garbage-free" prints. It went on the market at the end of 1970 and the rest, as they say, is history.
Read more of David Young's ongoing series on classic cameras
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Take a look at the best Polaroid cameras on the market today, see what the differences are between Instax vs Polaroid and don't forget to check what type of instant film you need.
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