Background

Ethnicity: His parents were of Eastern European Jewish descent.

Land was born on May 7, 1909, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, United States; the son of Martha (Goldfaden) Land and Harry Land.

Education

In 1927 Land graduated from Norwich Free Academy in Norwich, Connecticut, the United States. Also, he studied chemistry at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, but after his freshman year, he left and travelled to New York City.

Land was given an honorary degree of Doctor of Science from Tufts College in 1947, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1952, Colby College in 1955, Northeastern University in 1959, Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1964, Yale University in 1966, Columbia University in 1967, Loyola University in 1970 and New York University in 1973.

Career

Land began his career in New York, where he worked on scientific experiments independently. There he invented the very first cheap filters that had the ability to polarize light, the Polaroid film. Also Edwin visited New York Public Library in order to scour scientific literature for works concerning polarizing materials and substances.

Then in 1932, he established the Land-Wheelwright Laboratories together with his Harvard physics instructor, George Wheelwright, to commercialize his polarizing technology. Land developed and, in 1936, began to use numerous types of Polaroid material in sunglasses and other optical devices. He founded the Polaroid Corporation in 1937. Four years later Edwin developed a widely used, three-dimensional motion-picture process based on polarized light.

During World War II he worked in military projects and devised dark-adapt goggles, passively guided smart bombs and target finders. After the war Land began to work on an instantaneous developing film. In 1947, he demonstrated a camera, known as the Polaroid Land Camera, that produced a finished print in 60 seconds. The cameras were soon an instant success, selling out during the Christmas season in 1948 and would remain on the market for 50 years thereafter. A color-photo version of the product was released in 1963.

Also Land found that the colour perceived is not dependent on the relative amounts of blue, green and red light entering the eye. He proposed that at least three independent image-forming mechanisms, which he called retinexes, are sensitive to different colours and work in conjunction to indicate the colour seen.

In the 1950s, Land and his team helped design the optics of the revolutionary Lockheed U-2 spy plane. Also in the 1970s, Polaroid Corporation pioneered color instant film. In 1977, despite the tremendous success of his instant cameras, the company was unable to make a success of a film venture called Polavision and in 1982, he resigned as a chairman of Polaroid Corporation. But after that Edwin remained active in the field of light and colour research by working with the Rowland Institute of Science, a corporation that he founded in 1960.

Achievements

• Land invented inexpensive filters for polarizing light, Polaroid Land Camera, and the retinex theory of color vision. He received more than 500 patents for his innovations in light and plastics.
  
  Also, Edwin invented sheet polarizers which he placed under the Polaroid trademark and a Polaroid vectograph, a special stereoscopic viewing system that revealed the enemy even if they were camouflaged.
  
  In 1977, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in 1991.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Singular images 1974
  • Selected papers on industry 1983

Views

Quotations: "Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible."

"Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself."

"Marketing is what you do when your product is no good."

"The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it."

"If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it and don't think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; it is amazing how quickly you get through those 5, 000 steps."

"It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas."

Membership

Land was a member of New York Academy of Science, National Academy of Engineering, American Optical Society, Royal Institution of Great Britain, American Philosophical Society, German Photographic Society, Japan Society of Photographic Science and Technology, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain and Sigma Xi.

• Carnegie Commission on Educational Television , United States

  1966 - 1967

• National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress , United States

  1964 - 1966

• President's Science Advisory Committee , United States

  1957 - 1959

• President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board , United States

  1961 - 1977

Connections

In 1929, Edwin Land married Helen Terre Maislen. They had two daughters.

Father:

Harry Land

Harry was the owner of a scrap metal yard.

Mother:

Martha (Goldfaden) Land

Wife:

Helen Terre Maislen

Daughter:

Jennifer Land

Daughter:

Valerie Land

References

• A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War Apple founder Steve Jobs once hailed Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid and the father of instant photography, as "a national treasure" and once confessed to a reporter that meeting Land was "like visiting a shrine."
  2015
• Insisting On The Impossible: The Life Of Edwin Land If a single life exemplifies the inner drive that fires a great inventor, it is the life of Edwin Land. The major innovations that he was able to achieve in photography, optics, industry, and science policy carry priceless lessons for readers today.
  1998