- 5/24/2025
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00:28Miami, Florida, 1972.
00:32The cars, fabulous.
00:35The dolphins, undefeated.
00:37The Democratic and Republican conventions had come to town, but the biggest game around
00:43was a product launch party, and the thing up for sale was a camera.
00:49This tiny little pocket-sized camera, which folded up, and this perfect image that came
00:56out.
00:57The development of that system and how that made photography accessible and portable,
01:01that is groundbreaking.
01:04The SX70 instant camera was unlike anything anyone had ever seen, and it was every inch
01:11the kind of revolutionary device that Polaroid was already famous for.
01:16I can't imagine a world without the Polaroid.
01:19Many of my early milestones in my life were taken with a Polaroid camera.
01:24First communion, loss of a first tooth, all are in that white frame.
01:29Polaroid at its peak was enabling people to make about a billion pictures a year.
01:34No one didn't know what a Polaroid photograph was.
01:37It's one of the most instantly recognizable brands ever.
01:41That sense of playfulness was really at the kind of heart of the brand.
01:46Behind the magic was the genius of a man named Edwin Land, an inventor who'd been chasing
01:52the dream of instant photography since way back in the 1940s.
01:57Land is an icon, in his time and today.
01:59He grasped the way we take pictures now.
02:03Take a wallet out of my pocket, and perhaps open the wallet, press a button, close the
02:11wallet, and have the picture.
02:13Steve Jobs would tell you that Land was his idol in many, many ways, because he created
02:18this technology company that made products that people didn't even know they wanted.
02:23A camera which you would use not on the occasion of parties only, or of trips only, but a camera
02:30that you would use as often as your pencil or your eyeglasses.
02:35That Polaroid camera helped expand our knowledge of ourselves, knowledge of our community,
02:42and also what we can become.
02:46Never before had anything so completely incarnated the idea that a single machine really could
02:51change the world.
02:53For years, Land seemed able to divine what people wanted.
02:58It was a unique, intoxicating position of power.
03:02And making the impossible possible?
03:05That was better than any drug on the planet.
03:07He was a bit of an egotist, you might even say a narcissist.
03:11This person who has been almost hero-worshipped suddenly feels that the brand is him, and
03:18he is the brand, that it cannot somehow exist without him.
03:21For him, the Polaroid camera is something that society needs, and he must deliver.
03:28Every significant invention must come to a world that is not prepared for it.
03:32And so failure for someone like Edwin Land must seem like death.
04:11Late one summer night in Connecticut, on a back road in the deep dark, two vehicles
04:23were speeding towards disaster.
04:30The glare from the headlights was so blinding, there was barely time to swerve.
04:38A crash would have been fatal, but in one car, one passenger was more interested in
04:43the physics of what had just transpired than the danger.
04:48His name was Edwin Land, and he was 14 years old.
04:57Edwin Land was born in Connecticut in 1909.
04:59He didn't come from a family of intellectuals.
05:01His father was a scrap metal dealer.
05:04Land, though, was, you know, the classic image of the, like, overachieving brainy kid.
05:09You're talking about the World War I era.
05:11Obviously, there were no computers and no TV screens.
05:15Entertainment really consisted of things like the kaleidoscope.
05:19And he used to love those things.
05:21He became fascinated with optics, and this is as a very young boy.
05:24By the time he was a senior in high school, his science teacher confessed that he had
05:29nothing left to teach him.
05:31So at the age of 17, Land enrolled at Harvard, only to drop out after a single semester.
05:37He's bored with Harvard.
05:38He's bored with school.
05:39He's bored with the normal physics courses.
05:42He wasn't shy of doing things in an unorthodox manner.
05:47And dropping out of Harvard, I mean, that seems like such a crazy thing to do.
05:51In 1927, Land moved to New York City, where he hoped to develop a filter to solve the
05:57problem of headlight glare.
05:59And whenever the young inventor needed help, he enlisted his girlfriend, Terry Maislin.
06:07Late at night, the pair would sneak into the physics laboratory at Columbia University
06:12to conduct experiments with different glare-reducing materials.
06:16Land described it as a transient, violent need to create.
06:21The urge was so strong, he explained, you have a feeling of almost divine guidance.
06:28The solution to the glare problem on America's roads, Land now believed, lay in a physics
06:33phenomenon known as polarization.
06:37I will preface this by saying this is a very coarse approximation of the science.
06:42But light rays coming at you are actually quite scattered.
06:47It is evident that water waves have an up and down motion, as well as a direction of
06:52travel.
06:53And so it is with light waves.
06:56A polarizing filter, it has, at the microscopic level, slats.
07:00Some light comes in, some light doesn't come in.
07:03You have one polarizing filter, you see, you can see through it.
07:07Second one goes behind it, doesn't change the color much.
07:10Turn it 90 degrees, and it goes to black.
07:13It was not until the invention of a synthetic polarizing material by the scientist Edwin
07:18H. Land that polarized light could be put to work outside the laboratory.
07:23By 1932, Land had founded his own lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to refine the manufacturing
07:29of thin plastic polarized sheets.
07:33Just five years later, it had become a proper company, Polaroid.
07:39Land's new polarizing film worked perfectly to reduce headlight glare.
07:43But as it turned out, Detroit would never go for it.
07:48The automotive industry decided that too much work was required in order to put special
07:53films on the headlights and then also retrofit all the other automobiles.
07:57So they weren't really interested.
07:58It was a great idea and still has not been worked out 80 years later.
08:05Land was undeterred.
08:07He had already dreamed up other uses for his plastic polarizers.
08:12Polaroid light control materials will affect the lives of increasing millions in the new
08:16world ahead.
08:17He used it to make Polaroid sunglasses, camera lenses.
08:21He made the polarizing films that went into 3D glasses, special desk lamps that didn't
08:26have glare.
08:27In the 1930s, Polaroid got licensed to make a window for a rail car.
08:33If the sun is directly on you, you can rotate the inner window pane and cut down the incoming
08:40light.
08:41So Land is looking at every way that he can use this product.
08:44The war starts.
08:45The armies and the military are trying to find every advantage that they can have.
08:50And one of them is to block light.
08:51It very quickly became clear during the Second World War that using polarizing filters could
08:55make gun sights and bomb sights and goggles for pilots.
08:59The war effort was a big boost to Polaroid.
09:02The company grew like crazy during the war.
09:05But Land could see that the war was not going to last forever.
09:09And he knew that when those contracts came to an end, that he was going to have to shrink
09:12way down again.
09:13And he didn't like that idea.
09:14So he was trying to figure out, you know, what's the future going to be for my company?
09:18He said, we're going to have to do something else.
09:20And he was sort of fishing for what that other thing was.
09:26By December 1946, with the war over and peace now at hand, Polaroid's reckoning had arrived
09:32at last.
09:34Land was young, rich, and successful.
09:37And the truth was, he could now take on whatever challenge he damn well pleased.
09:42On stage in a small rented movie theater, he admitted to his employees that he already
09:47had a secret project in the works.
09:50Using all of our scientific background, we are going to realize this new wild dream.
09:57But for now, it was still the stuff of fantasy.
10:00And he could say no more.
10:03The invention of photography allowed people, in ways that weren't possible before, to document
10:20their lives and to own something, to hold something.
10:25Photography is incredibly important for us to be able to keep records, to tell our own
10:30for us to feel that we're alive.
10:34Rarely do you take pictures of things you hate.
10:37It's always things you love, places you love, people you love, things you want to remember.
10:44Even to this day, as we take our selfies, they really are about capturing that moment
10:48and knowing that that moment is going to live on.
10:54Land had once described photography as humanity's greatest invention.
10:59He believed that it transcended even science itself.
11:02I can put my eye to that finder and press the button, and then I have united once more
11:09the strange aggregation of cells that we are with the solid and beautiful world around us.
11:18To Land, all the world was a puzzle.
11:21Looked at the right way, even a broken sink at home was a great mystery.
11:27Terry, who'd become his wife back in 1929, would remember,
11:31it's the bane of my existence.
11:33As soon as he understands it, he wants somebody else to do it.
11:39Now Land's newest passion was photography, and he believed it had one big problem.
11:46People were just too far removed from its magic.
11:49If we look at early photography, we had heavy equipment.
11:52You've got chemicals, tents, tripods.
11:56You've got a whole lot of stuff that you need to carry to take one picture.
12:00You would take a picture, you'd have the negative, you'd have to take the negative in the dark
12:04out of your camera, you'd have to put it through a series of baths, all specific chemicals
12:09at specific concentrations at very specific temperatures, develop that negative.
12:15Once the negative was dry, you could superimpose it on a piece of photographic paper.
12:19Then you had a shine light through that paper, and then, you know, hours later, you would
12:25see your picture.
12:27However, in the days of film, really, the way most people made a picture was you shot
12:33your piece of film, and you put it in an envelope, and you mailed it off to the process.
12:38And until the age of the one-hour photo drop, you probably needed the better part of a week.
12:45Land was convinced that the whole process could be reinvented.
12:48His dream was to create a camera that could give people their photographs on the spot, instantly.
12:54The holy grail for Land is for us to have that dark room in our hands.
12:59You press the button, the camera does the rest.
13:02In December 1943, Land officially launched the secret project he codenamed SX-70.
13:09And the first member of the team was a brilliant 24-year-old researcher named Eudoxia Mueller.
13:16It all started, she remembered, with a phone call into my little lab.
13:20Do the following experiment, Land had said.
13:24Land's concept was to use what's known as a diffusion transfer process.
13:28You would take a normal negative, like you would have in a normal camera, put processing
13:34solution in between that negative and a piece of photographic paper.
13:39Essentially, the negative image would transfer and create a print.
13:45Easier said than done.
13:47Through nonstop experimentation, Mueller managed to obtain Polaroid's first ever instant photograph.
13:54Land was delighted with the rather pale brown image, Mueller recalled.
13:59He transmitted such enthusiasm that it was contagious.
14:03It looked bad.
14:04It was sort of yellow-brown and not very good, but it was a picture.
14:08It was an exciting beginning.
14:10And now they could start to refine everything from the chemistry to the engineering.
14:17Land himself sat for hundreds of test portraits.
14:20And he'd pull any member of his growing team into the lab to bear witness to the impossible
14:25suddenly being made real.
14:28And to take test portraits of them, too.
14:35By February 1947, the technology was still just a prototype, but Land couldn't keep his
14:41new invention secret from the world any longer.
14:45The venue was a conference of the Optical Society of America at the Hotel Pennsylvania
14:51in Manhattan.
14:52He went to a conference, a science conference.
14:56It is not the most exciting setting in the world.
14:58Not too many people are interested in going to science conferences.
15:01But he also knew enough to invite the press and show off this new invention.
15:08They had a large format, 8x10 camera rigged up with this new film in it.
15:13He had a picture taken of himself.
15:16Comes out of the camera.
15:17They put it through a processing rig, you know, it's all still experimental, so it goes
15:20through the rollers.
15:22And he peels it back.
15:24He showed his own portrait.
15:37People lost it.
15:38And you can just imagine how shocking and magical that moment must have been.
15:43And all the press photographers, they're watching, they know all the process, and they just witnessed
15:47that happening in a minute and a half.
15:50I mean, it was truly revolutionary in the real sense of the word.
15:55It was incredible.
15:56The Times reporter in the back had been sort of half paying attention and came up and said,
16:01do it again, which he did.
16:06The demonstration was a complete success, as almost every newspaper in the country ran
16:11the story of Polaroid's revolutionary new camera.
16:15The New York Times remarked that there is nothing like this in the history of photography.
16:21And at the heart of all the articles was none other than Edwin Land himself.
16:26Photography will never again be the same after today.
16:30And he couldn't have been more pleased.
16:35The Jordan Marsh department store was Boston's oldest.
16:38Smack in the middle of downtown, it was a shopper's paradise, bigger than Harvard's
16:42football stadium, selling everything from women's lingerie to the latest fashions and
16:48fur.
16:49It was here, the day after Thanksgiving 1948, that Land's new camera, the Model 95, was
16:56to finally make its debut.
16:58They had a first production run of about 60 cameras, which sounds so tiny, doesn't it?
17:03You know, now you would roll it out with a million, but then it was 60 cameras.
17:07And it was expensive.
17:08It was $89.50.
17:10In today's money, that's about $1,600.
17:13So this was not a cheap piece of equipment.
17:15This was an expensive thing.
17:17But some guy got up there saying, do you want to have your picture taken with a Polaroid
17:21camera?
17:22And the crowd gathered around, and they took the pictures and they started showing this.
17:28And everybody went wild.
17:30As it turned out, the dawn of instant photography couldn't have come at a better time.
17:35Across the country, Americans had fallen completely, absolutely, and insanely in love with taking
17:42pictures.
17:43By the 1950s, photography is a global operation.
17:47Everyone is bitten by this desire to take pictures.
17:50People have more leisure time than they had before, and they had more kids than they had
17:53before, and they want to take pictures of those, and they wanted to, you know, document
17:56the picnics they went on.
17:57The growing army of amateurs has built photography into the world's most popular hobby.
18:02In the United States alone, the photographic industry now earns a net profit of about $1
18:07billion a year.
18:09And Polaroid came along at just the right time to join in on that.
18:14The reigning king of the photography universe was a company in upstate New York, founded
18:19back in the 1880s by a high school dropout.
18:22His name was George Eastman, and the business he created was known as Kodak.
18:28Kodak is huge.
18:29Eastman becomes one of the richest men in the world.
18:32Tens of thousands of employees at a campus called Kodak Park that is just this giant
18:37complex of buildings.
18:39To most people around the country, Kodak meant camera, but it was their film that had
18:45driven the company's success.
18:47Film is hard to make, and Kodak was the gold standard for it.
18:52Land had no idea how to take Polaroid film from the lab to the marketplace.
18:58Where did he go?
18:59He went to Kodak.
19:01Scientists from the two companies worked closely together to turn Polaroid's revolutionary
19:05film into something that could be mass-produced.
19:09The saying in Rochester was, anything that's good for photography is good for Kodak.
19:16Back in Cambridge, Land shared with his team that he was determined to build something
19:20miles better than the groundbreaking product they already had.
19:24He wanted better film, faster, completely seamless processing.
19:29And at Polaroid, the science was far from the only thing that was revolutionary.
19:35And he included women in his company from really early days.
19:41At the time, there were not a lot of jobs for women in technology.
19:45He was open to allowing them to take on major projects and to use their own intelligence
19:52freely.
19:53He basically said, if you're talented and you can ask the right questions, then we have
19:57a space for you.
19:59Polaroid was unique, a place where women could thrive as researchers.
20:03And perhaps no single scientist on staff embodied Land's inclusive vision more so
20:07than one Maroi Morse, head of black and white film research.
20:13She was my boss.
20:14She ran that lab.
20:16And she'd never done anything like this before, but she was smart as a whip and creative.
20:22Back at Smith College, Morse had majored in art history and had never taken a chemistry
20:27course in her life.
20:28But she was an accomplished painter, an actor, and excelled in everything she did.
20:34She was an artist who also played the harp.
20:37That's an unusual, interesting character.
20:40And Land wanted unusual, interesting, smart people around him.
20:44And he went out and found them.
20:47As the company grew, Land became obsessed with creating a perfect camera.
20:53He believed that the whole world was waiting for a device so flawless, so elegant, and
20:58ultimately so simple, that it would change anyone who used it forever.
21:05I looked forward to the kind of photography that would become part of the human being,
21:13an adjunct to your memory, something that was always with you, so that when you looked
21:20at something, you could, in effect, press a button and have a record of it forever.
21:30No one believed the dream more than Edwin Land himself.
21:34He was certain that his machine would usher in a brand new way of life, and that he only
21:39needed to teach the people how to be ready for that brave new world.
21:50All right, just like this, Gary, a big smile, a big smile.
21:55Is that gorgeous?
21:57Pretty terrific camera, isn't it?
21:58How about that, hmm?
22:00Across the country, Americans were embracing Polaroid's technology.
22:05By 1958, instant cameras were flying off the shelves, though the massive size of Land's
22:10research budget kept any profits razor thin.
22:14But business was the last thing on Land's mind.
22:19Land was a quintessential scientist.
22:20He didn't really care about money.
22:22He was interested in solving a problem in innovation.
22:25He was a scientist first and a businessman second.
22:27He liked being in charge, but it was all a means to an end of spending time in the lab.
22:33It was really the thrill of the chase that motivated him, the scientific thrill of the chase.
22:37In the Polaroid labs, Land was at the heart of it all, his eyes on every prototype, his
22:42ideas driving every piece of R&D.
22:46It was perhaps the only place in America where a picture of a cute kid wasn't about
22:50the child at all.
22:52It was pure science.
22:55As the boss saw it, every member of the research staff should be experimenting constantly,
23:01at work and at home.
23:04Most of my photographs were just testing.
23:07I took so many pictures trying to figure out the difference between this film when you
23:14used it at night, or a cloudy day, or a bright day, or a dull day, or a rainy day.
23:23And so it was a combination of science and art.
23:27And that was the way Polaroid worked.
23:30It was all a great big experiment.
23:33And not all the researchers along for the ride were scientists.
23:37Ultimately, Polaroid's customers were part of the process too.
23:42But their findings weren't always what Polaroid wanted to hear.
23:47Over time, they're noticing that the images that they have are starting to fade.
23:51If you were documenting things like your kid's birthday party or your friend's wedding or
23:55whatever, and suddenly these pictures were starting to fade six months later, that would
23:58threaten the entire existence of this company.
24:01Despite Polaroid's popularity, Land had always run his business on innovation and faith,
24:07perpetually putting it one catastrophe away from collapse.
24:12Now, as neither he nor anyone else on staff could understand the roots of the mystery,
24:17he needed a fix, and fast.
24:20Murray Morse attacked the problem as hard as Land himself.
24:25By now, their collaboration had reshaped the company, their names linked on some of Polaroid's
24:30biggest patents.
24:32A day is all too short, Morse would confess to Land.
24:36Just when we've gotten warmed up to our problems, it's time to quit.
24:41She could keep up with him in terms of workload and in terms of her quick mind.
24:47They really understood each other.
24:48They were really close in a way the two sort of like minds could be close.
24:54Under immense pressure from their customers, Land, Morse, and the rest of the team finally
24:59found a temporary solution.
25:02It was a piece of novel chemistry, which internally they called the coder.
25:07In essence, what they figured out is what we needed was a coding, a coding that could
25:11be squeegeed on top to prevent the image from fading.
25:15Now, every single pack of Polaroid film came with a small vial full of liquid coder, a
25:21squeegee, and intricate instructions.
25:25But perhaps the biggest difference was that for about 10 minutes, each and every photograph
25:30was absolutely soaked.
25:33And that in turn caused people to start to dry it off.
25:37And that's where the shake comes from.
25:40You still shake your Polaroid picture because it used to be sopping wet.
25:44Suddenly, instant photography wasn't so instant, wasn't so simple, and it certainly wasn't
25:50elegant.
25:52As hard as Polaroid scientists went at the problem, the temporary solution would last
25:56more than a decade.
25:59For Land, something had changed.
26:02The hunt for a perfect device was no longer just about the science.
26:06He'd started to see his cameras differently.
26:09As he put it in a handwritten letter to all his employees, Polaroid is on its way to lead
26:15the world, perhaps even to save it.
26:19He always thought of the potential of connecting with people, how it could help people be their
26:26better selves.
26:27He was idealistic that way.
26:28He thought, he thought it would draw the world closer together.
26:31But now he started thinking the more people that have Polaroid in their hand, the more
26:36impact Polaroid has on the world.
26:39He literally said, Polaroid photography can cure rifts in contemporary life.
26:46That is incredibly powerful from just a little camera.
26:51He must have seemed insane when people were hearing this idea.
26:56He was interested in making everything better, always better.
27:00And I remember where I was standing, in his office, and he said, you can't ever stop making
27:06it better, or it's going to be worse.
27:13Even if you never owned a Polaroid camera, you remembered the jingle.
27:19Barry Manilow helped immortalize land's newest and first ever low-cost camera.
27:29Polaroid started to speak to a culture that wasn't being seen or heard.
27:35And that was the youth in the 1960s.
27:38So they invented this cute little camera on a string that you could hang from your wrist
27:42called the Swinger.
27:45The year was 1965, and the Swinger was on its way to becoming Polaroid's best-selling
27:51camera yet.
27:54At headquarters, all the news seemed to be good.
27:57And outside of Cambridge, it was becoming clear that maybe land was on to something
28:02real.
28:03I think the most magical thing about Polaroid is the fact that it is such an instant kind
28:08of connective tissue between people.
28:10You no longer have this process where you have to involve anyone else.
28:14It was just me and you in a room.
28:17In the American South at the time of segregation, in Jim Crow, a lab technician might be white
28:24and not believe that certain images of black people should be seen.
28:28But with Polaroid, you have the opportunity through the camera to document your lives.
28:35You could take a Polaroid without the pressure of anyone external judging or controlling.
28:42It came with it sort of freedom to document your life as you were living it.
28:47Through the mid-20th century, being queer is a secret.
28:53Being queer is also a crime.
28:57So when I look at Polaroid photos of queer people in the 1950s, you see true joy, you
29:04see true love.
29:06Inevitably, they wanted that joy that they felt in photographs to exist at all times
29:13and just to not be held down anymore.
29:21Back at Cambridge, land was busy building much more than the next camera.
29:26And it wasn't just Polaroid's customers who felt a new sense of freedom.
29:30At headquarters, a spirit of non-conformity ruled.
29:35Polaroid was the Apple computer of the 50s and 60s.
29:41Land created a company of incredible talent.
29:44It was by far the most special, most advanced, most spectacular technology company in the
29:51world.
29:52No one else was competing with them.
29:53No one else could do what they could do.
29:55It was really a revolutionary thing.
29:58But by the late 1960s, the realities of social change in America were to test land's leadership
30:04like never before.
30:09At 5 a.m. on April 5, 1968, the assembly line workers were just finishing up their shift
30:15when they got word that land was on site and was going to speak to them.
30:20Crowding into the cafeteria, few would have expected what he now wanted to talk about.
30:25Martin Luther King is dead, land announced.
30:30He called it a crisis point in American society and explained that he intended to bring more
30:35Black workers into Polaroid across all levels of the company.
30:40This is the first public and highly political statement that we see from an individual like
30:45land on the occasion of the assassination of Martin Luther King.
30:50And it tells us something about, I think, the ability of an inventor or CEO to really
30:55enact change.
30:58Land's commitment that morning would soon translate into the recruitment of more Black
31:02professionals into Polaroid's ranks.
31:06I went to Xavier University and majored in chemistry.
31:09I remember we received a pamphlet that included various corporations with job offers and we
31:17just filled that out by hand, if you can imagine.
31:21Polaroid was well-celebrated within the scientific community and it had a reputation of being
31:26liberal.
31:27So, to me, it was an easy decision.
31:30To a certain degree, the company itself was a space of social mobility and change.
31:37Built into that was, I think, a kind of notion of social good.
31:42And so, in some ways, that was a testament to land.
31:47For Polaroid's thousands of employees, the name itself could be a point of pride.
31:52We have been writing, without realizing it, a tremendous technological symphony.
31:59We are one of the strongest companies in the world in terms of those spiritual and intellectual
32:05qualities that lead to human strength.
32:09But the reality was, working for a man as brilliant and as demanding as Edwin Land was
32:15never, ever easy.
32:18It was an unusual place to work in that it was more sort of idealistic and cerebral and
32:24therefore more of a pain in the neck.
32:26This is a time when people were concerned with getting a job for life, where they were
32:29just going to put their heads down, do the hours, come home, have some semblance of family
32:34structure, and Polaroid asked far more of you.
32:38You somehow could not fit in unless you were willing to just say, Polaroid is my everything.
32:45Land was dedicated to his research.
32:48When he had a problem that he was working on, it subsumed his life.
32:52If Edwin Land had an idea in the middle of the night, you'd be calling up saying, you
32:56know, I need you right now.
32:59He could be abrupt.
33:00He could be tough to work with.
33:02Little niceties didn't occur to him.
33:05I know in the days when I was there, there were many people who ran around.
33:09Polaroid was scared to death of him.
33:11His expectation was that you would be there.
33:14You often did have to make those choices and sacrifice family and relationships.
33:18And just, yeah, Polaroid was your relationship.
33:22For better or for worse, Land was the same person at work and at home, as Terry and his
33:27two young daughters knew all too well.
33:31One time, he was taking them to the movies, and they stood out on the front porch while
33:36he went to the back of the house to get the car, and he got in the car, and he drove down
33:42to the lab.
33:43He went right by them.
33:44It tells you something about the way he operated.
33:49He was very fond of his wife and his daughters, but his focus was on his work.
34:02After decades of research and countless long days and late nights with Moroy Morris and
34:07Polaroid's chemists and engineers, Land's dreams were finally coming true.
34:13In 1969, Land created a prototype of what would become SX-70.
34:19That is what most people most commonly will associate with Polaroid, the little square
34:23with the wider border at the bottom where you'd write notes.
34:27All along, this was the camera that Land had been building in his mind.
34:32At long last, the photographs were in brilliant color and developed in seconds.
34:38No peeling, no coating, no anything required.
34:42The SX-70 was nothing short of genius.
34:47Most people, when they take their Polaroid picture, they're thinking that this is the
34:50masterpiece.
34:51But from a scientist's point of view, this is the masterpiece.
34:58So when you press the button, light hits the surface of the film.
35:01It starts the process for the negative to be created.
35:05You've got these sensitive layers that are sensitive to different colors that are activated.
35:10And then there's also layers of dyes.
35:12They start to activate right away.
35:14All of those things are happening at the same time.
35:17And then this exposure exits the camera.
35:20And then at the bottom of that frame, that's where the special chemicals that are officially
35:23called goo are spread onto the different layers.
35:27And the reaction starts.
35:28In less than 60 seconds, you have the image.
35:30I, like everyone, like to talk about this as a magic trick.
35:33Of course.
35:34Let's look at it.
35:35But it's actually better than magic because it's human.
35:39This is the product of very, very smart people applying themselves super hard, going at it
35:45as hard as they can, working 20-hour days, using science and art together to make something
35:53wonderful.
35:55And they succeeded.
35:58Because it's not mystical.
35:59It's brains in tangible form.
36:05It was a triumph so long sought.
36:08Land liked to say that coming up with the idea had taken him an afternoon.
36:12And realizing it, almost three decades.
36:16It would be another couple of years before the SX-70 would be ready for the market.
36:21But the experiment had, at long last, succeeded.
36:27I look forward to the time a few years from now of starting to use, in its accuracy, its
36:35beauty, our long-awaited ultimate camera that is a part of the evolving human being.
36:46But the truth was, no matter how fast Polaroid rushed the SX-70 to market, it wouldn't be
36:52quite soon enough.
36:53At the age of only 46, Maroi Morse was losing a battle with cancer.
37:00Up until the very last week of her life, Morse kept working, pushing forward the technologies
37:05she'd done so much to help create.
37:09On July 29, 1969, Polaroid's pioneering chemist died.
37:16Land was right there with her in the hospital in her last days.
37:21He was losing someone he considered his scientific soulmate.
37:26For Edwin Land, the things that you loved and the things that you cherished were few
37:30and far between.
37:32And so that must have been very difficult.
37:35At Polaroid, work had to go on.
37:38Although for the rest of his life, Land would keep Morse's office untouched, exactly as
37:44she'd left it.
37:47Land was on the cusp of achieving everything he'd ever dreamed of.
37:51But in reality, America's most successful living inventor was, more than ever, alone.
38:15As the years rolled on and the Cold War heated up, as busy as Land was with Polaroid, he
38:20was increasingly leading a double life.
38:24Land was the CIA's number one consultant on the issue of surveillance and technology.
38:31He developed the U-2 spy plane.
38:35When America was ready to put up its first spy satellites, he was in charge of that technology.
38:42He continued to work with the military, with the CIA, throughout his career.
38:47He was sort of like Superman and Clark Kent—privacy, reclusiveness, you know, cautiousness on
38:55the one hand, but the Barnum and Bailey showman on the other hand, who has the next great
39:01technological advance that he wants to show the world.
39:07Land's secret work never got in the way of his business.
39:10But by the early 1970s, he'd sunk so much capital into making Polaroid independent and
39:16cutting any need for codex help or film, that his company was now precariously leveraged
39:22on churning out a steady stream of successful new products.
39:26Polaroid's been used from pornography to dentistry, and literally everything in between.
39:32From high fashion to cutting-edge medicine, Polaroid had never been more places at once.
39:38The full array of its applications, and the devices it now produced, quite simply boggled
39:44the mind.
39:45Now, Polaroid decided that it was going to make this wonderful camera that would be great
39:48for governments.
39:49It was called the iD2.
39:50The iD2 is a 23-kilo hulk of a camera, and it only does one thing.
39:57It takes possible photographs.
39:59All right, will you sit right back, please?
40:02This advanced method, known as the Polaroid Land Identification System, simplifies the
40:05procedure of identifying people by providing speed and accuracy.
40:10But the simplicity of the iD2's processing meant that it was tailor-made to be a wholly
40:15different kind of tool, as two Polaroid employees, Caroline Hunter and Ken Williams, were about
40:22to find out.
40:23I'm at Polaroid, we're going to lunch, and we turn around and look at the bulletin board,
40:29and there is a mock-up of an ID card, and it says Department of the Mines Union of South
40:34Africa.
40:35Ken says, wow, I didn't know Polaroid was in South Africa.
40:40And that was the beginning.
40:41See, this is 1970.
40:441969, the year before, the UN says no company, no country, should interact with South Africa.
40:50It had an oppressive white supremacist regime.
40:53And so Caroline and Ken spend two weeks in the Cambridge Library, and this is what they
40:56find out.
40:57Every black South African had to carry with them a passbook.
41:00A passbook is a 20-page document that could tell where this person can go and where this
41:05person could not go.
41:07At the heart of this passbook was a picture created by Polaroid.
41:11Polaroid had neither hidden nor advertised its business in South Africa.
41:15Most Americans, even most Polaroid employees, quite simply, knew nothing about it.
41:21Obviously, we were horrified.
41:24We realized if our label is being used for this, we have to do something about it.
41:29In October, Hunter and Williams launched a grassroots movement.
41:34Only a few months later, they were speaking about Polaroid at the United Nations.
41:39I want to say right on, brothers, I'm very proud to be here.
41:43They were incredibly successful.
41:46They called for a full boycott in 1970, and that spread all over the world like wildfire.
41:52Now everywhere Land went, his speaking engagements were disrupted by protesters.
41:58We decided we were going to protest Land's presence as the guest speaker at this international
42:03convention of American scientists.
42:06So when he gets on the stage and he has this exchange with Ken, and they talk about Polaroid
42:10in South Africa, Land is very upset.
42:13He says, well, I have more black people than anybody else.
42:15Then he rambles on with all of the apologies that the South African government makes for
42:21apartheid.
42:23As the boycott threatened Polaroid's image and its sales during the busy holiday season,
42:29Land was asked what he thought about South Africa.
42:32The reason why I'm mad, he replied, is because these protesters are interfering with my personal
42:38goals.
42:39You're not speaking about someone who's always ethically minded, you're talking about someone
42:43who is driven by the technology, by doing the things that people thought were impossible.
42:50For him, it wasn't about ethics, it was about the product.
42:53It wasn't about whether something was right or wrong.
42:56So anyone that was standing in the way, damaging the reputation, was just barking up the wrong
43:01tree.
43:02By the spring of 1971, Polaroid had fired both Ken Williams and Caroline Hunter.
43:09But they refused to give up.
43:12And in the end, Polaroid would bow to public pressure and stop conducting business in South
43:17Africa.
43:19For his part, Land never took responsibility for Polaroid's involvement with the apartheid
43:25regime.
43:26Perhaps in life there is no such thing as an explicit correct choice.
43:31I don't know.
43:33We said to people, what are you going to support?
43:35What do you believe in?
43:36But for Edwin Land, he pretended South Africa wasn't there.
43:41He pretended he had no role in supporting apartheid.
43:46By the end of the controversy, Land was still as powerful as ever, but some illusions and
43:53some ideals had been forever shattered.
43:57Don't kid yourself, one employee remarked, Polaroid is a one-man company.
44:05The Polaroid Corporation plans to put an instant motion picture system on the market later
44:09on this year.
44:10Yesterday, the company showed the system to its stockholders.
44:15From the very beginning, Polaroid's guiding star had been Land's seemingly mystical ability
44:21to divine and deliver the next piece of tech that Americans didn't even know they wanted.
44:27And now he'd given the world this thing called Polavision.
44:32Is Polavision what America needed?
44:36Edwin Land certainly thought it was.
44:38Not many people can say that something is significant until after it is done.
44:45And we have become expert in sensing way ahead of time what is necessary, what is desired,
44:50what will be desirable, what will be enjoyable.
44:53So many people said to Land that Polavision was a terrible idea.
44:57They could foresee all of the problems with the product.
45:00It wasn't great quality.
45:01It's meant to be portable.
45:02You know, the portable processor, it's really not very portable.
45:06It can't quite record sound.
45:08It's kind of like a silent film.
45:10It was a really quite ridiculous product.
45:13Times were changing.
45:15For almost half a century, Polaroid had driven that change.
45:19But now, things were different.
45:21Land was increasingly sort of out of touch with what the consumer wanted or needed, where
45:26almost any idea that he would come up with was something that was worth pursuing.
45:29As you age, you don't want to be told, you don't know what people want.
45:34You don't want to be told, this isn't it.
45:38At Polaroid, employees had once called Land the boy genius.
45:43But he wasn't a boy any longer.
45:46With its stock in freefall, there were rumblings that Land should step down.
45:51All his financial gambles, once the very measure of his success, seemed to be finally catching
45:57up with him.
45:59And the news just kept getting worse.
46:05Since the debut of the Model 95, back in 1948, Polaroid had always been alone in the instant
46:11photography market.
46:13No longer.
46:14In 1976, Kodak finally did it.
46:17They introduced a line of instant cameras in film.
46:19The camera produced a picture that came out with a white tab at the bottom and began to
46:23zzzz right out of the camera.
46:24Land took this very personally.
46:26He said, I'm disappointed in them.
46:28They have all these resources, all the money in the world, they're ten times our size,
46:33all these smart people working for them, and all they could do was rip us off.
46:37From now on, the full force of Land's intellect, and the entirety of his focus, would be devoted
46:44to a new singular task, taking Kodak to court and making them pay.
46:50The patent suits could take years to resolve.
46:52At stake is the six billion dollar American photographic business.
46:57From the very beginnings of the trial, Land was turning up every single day at court.
47:02It was his cause.
47:03It was his company.
47:04It was his work.
47:05It was his passion.
47:07It was all on trial there.
47:08It was righteousness.
47:10He did not just want a settlement where Kodak paid a fee every year.
47:15He wanted Kodak out of the business.
47:18And the lawyers kept saying, we could work this out, and he said, no, I want an injunction.
47:22Over the course of the entire trial, Land's attention never wavered.
47:26The minutia of the proceedings obsessing him, just as completely as any laboratory mystery
47:32once had.
47:34Instead of delegating the case to a very capable team of lawyers, Land felt that no one else
47:39could fight Polaroid's corner better than he could.
47:42He was not doing anything else.
47:44So the company just felt like a ship without a captain.
47:49By the 1980s, instant photography remained as popular as ever.
47:54But the company that had started it all was struggling to survive.
47:58And even good news just couldn't right the ship.
48:02Legal action was as complex as the cameras, but there was nothing instant about the outcome.
48:06So today, Kodak conceded defeat, their cameras and films being removed this morning from
48:11stores right across America.
48:13Kodak actually had to pull all of its camera and film out of the stores, even though 13
48:18million Americans already had them.
48:19They had a big picnic at Polaroid headquarters.
48:24They had T-shirts made up.
48:25They won.
48:26They won.
48:27They won.
48:29It's incredibly sad because it was already, they may not have grasped, but it was already
48:34over that this fight had been irrelevant.
48:38In Cambridge, the once unimaginable had come to pass.
48:43Edwin Land had been pushed out of Polaroid.
48:48The company he'd founded and led for almost half a century would not last long without him.
48:59As Polaroid's influence faded, Americans seemed to move on, falling in love with a
49:06whole new kind of magic machine.
49:09So much digital technology has come along and taken away the kind of reasons for Polaroid
49:14for being.
49:15In actual fact, I think there are very few things in life that are as magical as watching
49:20the Polaroid image develop in your hand.
49:23There's this little bit of alchemy that makes this beautiful object, which forever ties
49:28you to the moment.
49:30Yeah, that's the magic that just endures and will endure forever.
49:35To take a good picture, you must open your eyes, open your heart, and just look.
49:44I'm constantly in awe of Edwin Land and what he accomplished in one lifetime.
49:50Everything that was new was interesting to him.
49:53What ideas he was creating and what he saw for the future was just thrilling and exciting.
50:02Land's story is a critical American story, but it has to be told to the full truth of
50:07who he was, what he did, and the impact of all of his work, good and bad.
50:12Land really believed at its core that Polaroid could do good by giving people control to
50:18capture their image.
50:20But he struggled when the need to do social good intersected with the realities of running
50:25a company.
50:26Through it all, Land's focus was always on his work, on how his next invention might
50:32have the power to change people's lives.
50:36Land had this idea that you would document your whole life in pictures and your family's
50:42whole life in pictures.
50:43I think if we were to gather all of the Polaroids ever taken and we were to put them in one
50:46place, we'd actually be able to see a much more nuanced view of humanity.
50:52There was no editing.
50:54There was no cropping out of that person that you didn't like.
50:59Polaroid was in the business of making us more human.
51:01I mean, instant photography is such a personal thing because when I take a picture of someone
51:07I just saw a moment ago, we were focusing on things that are going on in the present,
51:11but we're also focused on things that are in the past.
51:16Most of us can't be time travelers, but I think that's the magic of Polaroid pictures.
51:41I think that's the magic of Polaroid pictures.
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