With the advent of instant photography, Polaroid revolutionized the industry in a flash. Never before the Model 95 camera debuted in 1948, exceeding all of its sales projections, had anyone been able to view a picture they’d taken just moments after clicking the shutter. Equally innovative, however, was the company that produced such a groundbreaking technology. 

Polaroid’s founder, Edwin Land, was an ingenious inventor and creative mastermind, regularly cited more than half a century later by Steve Jobs as a personal hero. But Land’s greatest skill was finding and cultivating potential. And the company had a secret source of talent: art history graduates from Smith College, a small women’s liberal arts college in Northampton, Massachusetts.

In 1934, years before Land had even conceived of his iconic camera, he met Smith professor Clarence Kennedy, and the two bonded over their shared love of photography. Kennedy, an expert in ancient and Renaissance sculpture, eventually became one of Polaroid’s first consultants; he also began sending his top graduates to the company. At a time when the competition wasn’t hiring women—let alone recent grads with art history degrees—Polaroid tapped into a reservoir of brilliant young women.

Polaroid’s interdisciplinary work culture valued the arts as much as the sciences, aesthetics as much as technique, and viewed instant photography as the marriage of both. The company often sent recent hires to take several semesters of courses in organic chemistry, optics, and physics, understanding the importance of employees who could oscillate effortlessly between chemical compounds and color theory. “Land proved many times over,” wrote Peter Wensberg, a Polaroid marketing executive, “that a bright young liberal arts student could learn the routines of the laboratory and the structure of a scientific discipline as rapidly as applicants with technical experience. He liked the fact that his students had little to unlearn.”

Internally, these gifted Smith College graduates were sometimes referred to as the “princesses.” Even given Polaroid’s progressive work culture, they were still subject to sexism. But while the term princess conjures delicate royalty, the assiduous Smith grads were anything but. They worked incredibly hard, putting in long hours with the expectation that they were available around the clock. Sarah Hollis Perry, one employee, even had a dedicated telephone installed in her house to take Land’s calls.

Another Smith graduate, Lucretia Weed, was hired out of school and spent the next 30 years of her career at Polaroid, eventually leading the lab groups that developed PolaLine transparency film and Polavision. Land estimated that, accounting for weekends and overtime, she had actually worked 60 years with him, in spite of the fact that he retired eight years before her career ended.

Despite the long hours, most employees praised Polaroid’s rewarding, research-intensive work culture. There was an expectation of innovation in the company’s Cambridge, Massachusetts laboratories. It was a uniquely creative environment that allowed younger graduates to learn and flourish. On her first day, a 22-year-old Perry was tasked with a memorandum instructing her to “study…how to make our kind of photography an indigenous American art.” While certainly daunting, this order perfectly encapsulated the mission and culture of Polaroid. 

That memo was sent by perhaps the most notable Smith College graduate, Meroë Marston Morse. During her career, Morse became one of Polaroid’s most important visionaries—leading black-and-white photographic research, directing special photographic research, and registering 18 patents. 

At the heart of her success was the commitment to developing a product that suited artists. She worked tirelessly with photographer Ansel Adams to ensure that the experience of Polaroid was professionally and artistically satisfying.  Morse and others at Polaroid understood that the artists as much as the cameras themselves created the iconic imagery. Robert Mappelthorpe took Polaroid pictures of his muse Patti Smith, Chuck Close used them to create pixel-like, overscale self portraits, and Andy Warhol shot thousands of celebrity photos on his Big Shot camera. It was hardly an accident that the company’s cameras became a pop culture phenomenon.

And certainly, no one embodied Land’s ethos and work ethic more than Morse, who ran her lab literally around the clock. In one of her many letters to him, she wrote, “A day is all too short. It always seems to me that we just really get warmed up to our problems and then it’s time to quit.” Morse, like all of the other women behind the company’s cameras, embodied what Polaroid was all about: interdisciplinary excellence, boundless curiosity, and relentless effort. 

At its peak in 1991, the company brought in nearly $3 billion in revenue. To have created one of last century’s greatest corporate success stories, Land created a company like no other. And perhaps that’s Polaroid’s true legacy, after its prints faded and bankruptcy shuttered its doors—cultivating a culture that embraces new perspectives, and isn’t afraid to look in unexpected places to find them.