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AMERICAN EXPERIENCE FILMS
MR. POLAROID
NARRATOR: Miami, Florida, 1972. The cars, fabulous. The Dolphins, undefeated. The Democratic and Republican conventions had come to town. But the biggest game around was a product launch party – and the thing up for sale was a camera.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: This tiny little pocket-sized camera, which folded up and this perfect image that came out. The perfection of that system and how that made photography accessible and portable – that is groundbreaking.
NARRATOR: The SX70 instant camera was unlike anything anyone had ever seen – and it was every inch the kind of revolutionary device that Polaroid was already famous for.
DREW THOMPSON, ART HISTORIAN: I can’t imagine a world without the Polaroid.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: Many of my early milestones in my life were taken with a Polaroid camera. First Communion, loss of a first tooth – all are in that white frame.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: Polaroid at its peak was enabling people to make about a billion pictures a year. No one didn’t know what a Polaroid photograph was.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: It’s one of the most instantly recognizable brands ever. That sense of playfulness was really at the kind of heart of the brand.
NARRATOR: Behind the magic was the genius of a man named Edwin Land, an inventor who’d been chasing the dream of instant photography since way back in the 1940s.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: Land is an icon in his time and today.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: He grasped the way we take pictures now.
ARCHIVAL
EDWIN LAND: Take a wallet out of my pocket and perhaps open the wallet, press a button, close the wallet and have the picture.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: Steve Jobs would tell you that Land was his idol in many, many ways because he created this technology company that made products that people didn't even know they wanted.
ARCHIVAL
EDWIN LAND: A camera which you would use not on the occasion of parties only or of trips only, but a camera that you would use as often as your pencil or your eye glasses.
PARKER SARGENT, FILMMAKER: That Polaroid camera helped expand our knowledge of ourselves, knowledge of our community. And also what we can become.
NARRATOR: Never before had anything so completely incarnated the idea that a single machine really could change the world. For years, Land seemed able to divine what people wanted. It was a unique, intoxicating position of power. And making the impossible possible? That was better than any drug on the planet.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: He was a bit of an egotist, you might even say a narcissist.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: This person who has been almost hero-worshiped suddenly feels that the brand is him and he is the brand. That it cannot somehow exist without him.
PARKER SARGENT, FILMMAKER: For him, the Polaroid camera is something that society needs and he must deliver.
ARCHIVAL
EDWIN LAND: Every significant invention must come to a world that is not prepared for it.
PARKER SARGENT, FILMMAKER: Failure for someone like Edwin Land must seem like death.
NARRATOR: Late one summer night in Connecticut, on a backroad in the deep dark, two vehicles were speeding towards disaster. The glare from the headlights was so blinding, there was barely time to swerve.
A crash would have been a fatal. But in one car, one passenger was more interested in the physics of what had just transpired, than the danger. His name was Edwin Land. And he was 14 years old.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: Edwin Land was born in Connecticut in 1909. He didn’t come from a family of intellectuals. His father was a scrap metal dealer. Land though was, you know, the classic image of the, like, overachieving brainy kid.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: You’re talking about the World War I era. Obviously, there were no computers and no TV screens. Entertainment really consisted of things like the kaleidoscope. And he used to love those things. He became fascinated with optics – and this is as a very young boy.
NARRATOR: By the time he was a senior in high school, his science teacher confessed that he had nothing left to teach him. So at the age of 17, Land enrolled at Harvard – only to drop out after a single semester.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: He’s bored with Harvard. He’s bored with school. He’s bored with the normal physics courses.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: He wasn’t shy of doing things in an unorthodox manner. And dropping out of Harvard – I mean, that seems like such a crazy thing to do.
NARRATOR: In 1927, Land moved to New York City, where he hoped to develop a filter to solve the problem of headlight glare. And whenever the young inventor needed help, he enlisted girlfriend, Terre Maislen. Late at night, the pair would sneak into the physics laboratory at Columbia University to conduct experiments with different glare reducing materials. Land described it as a “transient, violent need” to create. The urge was so strong, he explained, “you have a feeling of almost divine guidance.”
The solution to the glare problem on America’s roads, Land now believed, lay in a physics phenomenon known as polarization.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: I will preface this by saying that this is a very coarse approximation of the science, but: light rays coming at you are actually quite scattered.
ARCHIVAL VO:
NEWSCASTER: It is evident that water waves have an up and down motion, as well as a direction of travel. And so it is with light waves.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: A polarizing filter, it has – at the microscopic level – slats.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: Some light comes in, some light doesn’t come in.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: You have one polarizing filter. You see – you can see through it. Second one goes behind it. Doesn’t change the color much. Turn it 90 degrees, and it goes to black.
ARCHIVAL VO:
NEWSCASTER: It was not until the invention of a synthetic polarizing material by the scientist Edwin H. Land that polarized light could be put to work outside the laboratory.
NARRATOR: By 1932, Land had founded his own lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to refine the manufacturing of thin plastic polarized sheets. Just five years later, it had become a proper company – Polaroid. Land’s new polarizing film worked perfectly to reduce headlight glare, but, as it turned out, Detroit would never go for it.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: The automotive industry decided that too much was required in order to put special films on the headlights and then also retrofit all the other automobiles, so they weren’t really interested.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: It was a great idea and still has not been worked out 80 years later.
NARRATOR: But Land was undeterred. He had already dreamed up other uses for his plastic polarizers.
ARCHIVAL VO:
Polaroid light control materials will affect the lives of increasing millions in the new world ahead.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: He used it to make Polaroid sunglasses. Camera lenses.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: He made the polarizing films that went into 3D glasses. Special desk lamps that didn’t have glare.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: In the 1930s, Polaroid got licensed to make a window for a railcar.
ARCHIVAL VO:
If the sun is directly on you, you can rotate the inner window pane and cut down the incoming light.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: So Land is looking at every way that he can use this product – the war starts. The armies and the military are trying to find every advantage that they can have. And one of them is to block light.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: Very quickly became clear during the Second World War that using polarizing filters could make gunsights and bombsights and goggles for pilots.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: The war effort was a big boost to Polaroid.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: The company grew like crazy during the war.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: But Land could see that the war was not going to last forever.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: And he knew that when those contracts came to an end, that we he was going to have to shrink way down again. And he didn’t like that idea.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: So he was trying to figure out, you know, what’s the future going to be for my company.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: We’re going to have to do something else. And he was sort of fishing for what that other thing was.
NARRATOR: By December 1946, with the war over and peace now at hand, Polaroid’s reckoning had arrived at last. Land was young, rich, and successful and the truth was he could now take on whatever challenge he damn well pleased. On stage in a small rented movie theater, he admitted to his employees that he already had a secret project in the works.
ARCHIVAL AUDIO:
EDWIND LAND: Using all of our scientific background, we are going to realize this new wild dream.
NARRATOR: But, for now, it was still the stuff of fantasy, and he could say no more.
DREW THOMPSON, ART HISTORIAN: The invention of photography allowed people in ways that weren’t possible before to document their lives and to own something, to hold something.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: Photography is incredibly important for us to be able to keep records, to tell our own history, for us to feel that we’re alive.
PARKER SARGENT, FILMMAKER: Rarely do you take pictures of things you hate. It’s always things you love, places you love, people you love, things you want to remember. Even ’til this day as we take our selfies, they really are about capturing that moment and knowing that that moment is going to live on.
NARRATOR: Land had once described photography as humanity’s greatest invention. He believed that it transcended even science itself.
ARCHIVAL AUDIO:
EDWIND LAND: I can put my eye to that finder and press the button and then I have united once more – the strange aggregation of cells that we are – with the solid and beautiful world around us.
NARRATOR: To Land, all the world was a puzzle. Looked at the right way, even a broken sink at home was a great mystery. Terre, who’d become his wife back in 1929, would remember, “It’s the bane of my existence. [...] As soon as he understands it he wants somebody else to do it.” Now, Land’s newest passion was photography. And he believed it had one big problem: people were just too far removed from its magic.
DREW THOMPSON, ART HISTORIAN: If we look at early photography we had heavy equipment.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: We’ve got chemicals, tents, tripods. You’ve got a whole lot of stuff that you need to carry to take one picture.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: You would take a picture, you’d have the negative, you’d have to take the negative in the dark out of your camera, you’d have to put it through a series of baths, all specific chemicals at specific concentrations, and very specific temperatures; develop that negative; once the negative was dry, you could superimpose it on a piece of photographic paper. Then you had to shine light through that paper. And then, you know, hours later, you would see your picture.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: However, in the days of film, really, the way most people made a picture was you shot your piece of film and you put it in an envelope and you mailed it off to be processed. And until the age of the one-hour photo drop, you probably needed the better part of a week.
NARRATOR: Land was convinced that the whole process could be reinvented. His dream was to create a camera that could give people their photographs on the spot, instantly.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: The holy grail for Land is for us to have that darkroom in our hands. You press the button, the camera does the rest.
NARRATOR: In December 1943, Land officially launched the secret project he code-named SX70.
And the first member of the team was a brilliant 24-year-old researcher named Eudoxia Muller.
It all started, she remembered, with “a phone call into my little lab.” “Do the following experiment,” Land had said.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: Land’s concept was to use what's known as a diffusion transfer process. You would take a normal negative, like you would have in a normal camera, put processing solution in between that negative and a piece of photographic paper. Essentially a negative image would transfer and create a print. Easier said than done.
NARRATOR: Through nonstop experimentation, Muller managed to obtain Polaroid’s first ever instant photograph.
“[Land was] delighted with the rather pale brown image,” Muller recalled. “[He] transmitted such enthusiasm that it was contagious.”
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: It looked bad. It was sort of yellow-brown, and not very good, but it was a picture.
NARRATOR: It was an exciting beginning, and now they could start to refine everything from the chemistry to the engineering. Land himself sat for hundreds of test portraits. And he’d pull any member of his growing team into the lab to bear witness to the impossible suddenly being made real. And to take test portraits of them too. By February 1947, the technology was still just a prototype but Land couldn’t keep his new invention secret from the world any longer. The venue was a conference of the Optical Society of America, at the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: He went to a conference, a science conference.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: It is not the most exciting setting in the world.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: Not too many people are interested in going to science conferences.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: But he also knew enough to invite the press and show off this new invention. They have a large format 8x10 camera rigged up with this new film in it.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: He had a picture taken of himself.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: Comes out of the camera. They put it through a processing rig. It’s still experimental. It goes through the rollers and he peels it back.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: He showed his own portrait. People lost it.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: You can imagine how shocking and magical that moment must have been. All the press photographers, they’re watching, they know all the process and they just witnessed that happening in a minute and a half.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: I mean, it was truly revolutionary in the real sense of the word. It was incredible.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: The Times in the back had been sort of half paying attention and came up and said ‘Do it again,’ which he did.
NARRATOR: The demonstration was a complete success. As almost every newspaper in the country ran the story of Polaroid’s revolutionary new camera. The New York Times remarked that “there is nothing like this in the history of photography.” And at the heart of all the articles was none other than Edwin Land himself.
ARCHIVAL AUDIO:
EDWIND LAND: Photography will never again be the same after today.
NARRATOR: And he couldn’t have been more pleased.
NARRATOR: The Jordan Marsh department store was Boston’s oldest. Smack in the middle of downtown, it was a shopper’s paradise, bigger than Harvard’s football stadium, selling everything from women’s lingerie to the latest fashions in fur. It was here, the day after Thanksgiving, 1948, that Land’s new camera, the Model 95, was to finally makes its debut.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: They had a first production run of about 60 cameras, which sounds so tiny, doesn't it? Now you would roll it out with a million, but then it was 60 cameras, and it was expensive. It was 89.50.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: In today’s money, that’s about 1,600 dollars, so this was not a cheap piece of equipment. This was an expensive thing. But some guy got up there saying “You want to have your picture taken with a Polaroid camera?” And a crowd gathered around and they took the pictures and they started showing this and everybody went wild.
NARRATOR: As it turned out, the dawn of instant photography couldn’t have come at a better time. Across the country, Americans had fallen completely, absolutely, and insanely in love with taking pictures.
DREW THOMPSON, ART HISTORIAN: By the 1950s photography is a global operation.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: Everyone is bitten by this desire to take pictures.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: People had more leisure time than they had before and they had more kids than they had before, and they wanted to take pictures of those, and they wanted to, you know, document the picnics they went on.
ARCHIVAL VO:
The growing army of amateurs has built photography into the world’s most popular hobby. In the United States alone the photographic industry now earns a net profit of about one billion dollars a year.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: And Polaroid came along at just the right time to join in on that.
NARRATOR: The reigning king of the photography universe was a company in upstate New York, founded back in the 1880s by a high school drop out. His name was George Eastman, and the business he’d created was known as Kodak.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: Kodak is huge. Eastman becomes one of the richest men in the world.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: Tens of thousands of employees. A campus called Kodak Park that is just this giant complex of buildings.
NARRATOR: To most people around the country, Kodak meant camera. But it was their film that had driven the company’s success.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: Film is hard to make, and Kodak was the gold standard for it.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: Land had no idea how to take Polaroid film from the lab to the marketplace. Where did he go? He went to Kodak.
NARRATOR: Scientists from the two companies worked closely together to turn Polaroid’s revolutionary film into something that could be mass produced. The saying in Rochester was, “Anything [that’s] good for photography is good for Kodak.”
Back in Cambridge Land shared with his team that he was determined to build something miles better than the groundbreaking product they already had. He wanted better film, faster, completely seamless processing. And at Polaroid, the science was far from the only thing that was revolutionary.
PARKER SARGENT, FILMMAKER: Land included women in his company from really early days.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: At the time there were not a lot of jobs for women in technology.
PARKER SARGENT, FILMMAKER: He was open to allowing them to take on major projects and to use their own intelligence freely.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: He basically said if you’re talented and you can ask the right questions then we have a space for you.
NARRATOR: Polaroid was unique, a place where women could thrive as researchers – and perhaps no single scientist on staff embodied Land’s inclusive vision more so than one Meroë Morse, head of black and white film research.
HOLLY FRENCH PERRY, POLAROID RESEARCHER: She was my boss. She ran that lab, and she’d never done anything like this before, but she was smart as a whip and creative.
NARRATOR: Back at Smith College, Morse had majored in art history and had never taken a chemistry course in her life, but she was an accomplished painter, an actor – and excelled in everything she did.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: She was an artist who also played the harp. Who plays the harp? That’s an unusual, interesting character, and Land wanted unusual, interesting, smart people around him, and he went out and found them.
NARRATOR: As the company grew, Land became obsessed with creating a perfect camera. He believed that the whole world was waiting for a device so flawless, so elegant, and ultimately so simple that it would change anyone who used it, forever.
ARCHIVAL AUDIO:
EDWIND LAND: I look forward to the kind of photography that would become part of the human being, an adjunct to your memory, something that was always with you so that when you looked at something, you could in effect press a button and have a record of it forever.
NARRATOR: No one believed the dream more than Edwin Land himself. He was certain that his machine would usher in a brand new way of life. And that he only needed to teach the people how to be ready for that brave new world.
ARCHIVAL: TALK SHOW HOST: Now, just like this, Garry, nice smile.
ARCHIVAL: TALK SHOW HOST: Big smile.
ARCHIVAL: TALK SHOW HOST #3: That’s gorgeous.
ARCHIVAL: TALK SHOW HOST #4: Pretty terrific camera, isn’t it? How about that?
NARRATOR: Across the country, Americans were embracing Polaroid’s technology. By 1958, instant cameras were flying off the shelves, though the massive size of Land’s research budget kept any profits razor thin. But business, was the last thing on Land’s mind.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: Land was a quintessential scientist. He didn’t really care about money. He was interested in solving a problem in innovation.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: He was a scientist first and businessman second. He liked being in charge but it was all a means to an end of spending time in the lab. It was really the thrill of the chase that motivated him, the scientific thrill of the chase.
NARRATOR: In the Polaroid labs, Land was at the heart of it all – his eyes on every prototype, his ideas driving every piece of R&D.It was perhaps the only place in America where a picture of a cute kid wasn’t about the child at all. It was pure science. As the boss saw it, every member of the research staff should be experimenting constantly, at work and at home.
HOLLY FRENCH PERRY, POLAROID RESEARCHER: Most of my photographs were just testing. I took so many pictures. Trying to figure out the difference between this film when you used it at night, or cloudy day, or a bright day, or a dull day, or a rainy day. And so it was a combination of science and art, and that was the way Polaroid worked.
NARRATOR: It was all a great big experiment. And not all the researchers along for the ride were scientists. Ultimately, Polaroid’s customers were part of the process too. But their findings weren’t always what Polaroid wanted to hear.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: Over time, they’re noticing that the images that they have are starting to fade.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: If you were documenting things like your kid’s birthday party or your friend’s wedding or whatever, and suddenly these pictures were starting to fade six months later, that would threaten the entire existence of this company.
NARRATOR: Despite Polaroid’s popularity, Land had always run his business on innovation… and faith – perpetually putting it one catastrophe away from collapse. Now, as neither he nor anyone else on staff could understand the roots of the mystery, he needed a fix, and fast.
Meroë Morse attacked the problem as hard as Land himself. By now their collaboration had reshaped the company, their names linked on some of Polaroid’s biggest patents.
“A day is all too short,” Morse would confess to Land. “Just … [when we’ve gotten] warmed up to our problems [...] it’s time to quit.”
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: She could keep up with him in terms of workload and in terms of her quick mind. They really understood each other. They were really close in a way the two sort of like minds could be close.
NARRATOR: Under immense pressure from their customers, Land, Morse and the rest of the team finally found a temporary solution. It was a piece of novel chemistry which internally they called The Coater.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: In essence, what they figured out is, “What we needed was a coating.” A coating that could be squeegeed on top to prevent the image from fading.
NARRATOR: Now, every single pack of Polaroid film came with a small vial full of liquid coater, a squeegee, and intricate instructions. But perhaps the biggest difference was that for about ten minutes, each and every photograph was absolutely soaked.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: And that in turn caused people to start to dry it off, and that’s where the shake comes from. You still shake your Polaroid pictures, ’cause it used to be soaping wet.
NARRATOR: Suddenly, instant photography wasn’t so instant, wasn’t so simple – and it certainly wasn’t elegant. As hard as Polaroid’s scientists went at the problem, the temporary solution would last more than a decade. For Land, something had changed. The hunt for a perfect device was no longer just about the science. He’d started to see his cameras differently. As he put it in a hand-written letter to all his employees, “Polaroid is on its way to lead the world – perhaps even to save it.”
PARKER SARGENT, FILMMAKER: He always thought of the potential of connecting with people, how it could help people be their better selves.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: He was idealistic that way. He thought, he thought it would draw the world closer together.
PARKER SARGENT, FILMMAKER: But now he starting thinking the more people that have Polaroid in their hand, the more impact Polaroid has on the world. He literally said Polaroid photography can cure rifts in contemporary life. That is incredibly powerful from just a little camera. He must have seemed insane when people were hearing this idea.
HOLLY FRENCH PERRY, POLAROID RESEARCHER: He was interested in making everything better, always better. And I remember where I was standing in his office, and he said, “You can’t ever stop making it better or it’s going to be worse.”
NARRATOR: Even if you never owned a Polaroid camera, you remembered the jingle.
POLAROID COMMERCIAL:
Meet the Swinger, the Polaroid Swinger…
NARRATOR: Barry Manilow helped immortalize Land’s newest – and first ever – low-cost camera.
POLAROID COMMERCIAL:
It’s more than a camera… it’s almost alive … it’s only 19 dollars and 95. … You swing it up!
PARKER SARGENT, FILMMAKER: Polaroid was very unique in that they started to speak to a culture that wasn’t being seen or heard. And that was the youth in the 1960s. So they invented this cute little camera on a string that you could hang from your wrist called the Swinger.
NARRATOR: The year, was 1965. And the Swinger was on its way to becoming Polaroid’s best selling camera yet. At headquarters, all the news seemed to be good. And outside of Cambridge? It was becoming clear that maybe Land was onto something real.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: I think the most magical thing about Polaroid is the fact that it is such an instant kind of connective tissue between people. You no longer had this process where you had to involve anyone else. It was just me and you in a room.
DREW THOMPSON, ART HISTORIAN: In the American South at the time of segregation and Jim Crow, the lab technician might be white and not believe that certain images of Black people should be seen. But with Polaroid you have the opportunity, through the camera, to document your lives.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: You could take a Polaroid without the pressure of anyone external judging or controlling. It came with it sort of freedom to document your life as you were living it.
PARKER SARGENT, FILMMAKER: Through the mid 20th century, being queer is a secret. Being queer is also a crime. So when I look at Polaroid photos of queer people in the 1950s, you see true joy, you see true love. Inevitably they wanted that joy that they felt in photographs to exist at all times, and just to not be held down anymore.
NARRATOR: Back at Cambridge, Land was busy building much more than the next camera, and it wasn’t just Polaroid’s customers who felt a new sense of freedom. At headquarters, a spirit of nonconformity ruled.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: Polaroid was the Apple computer of the fifties and sixties. Land created a company of incredible talent. It was by far the most special, most advanced, most spectacular technology company in the world. No one else was competing with them, no one else could do what they could do. It was really a revolutionary thing.
NARRATOR: But by the late 1960s, the realities of social change in America were to test Land’s leadership like never before. At 5 AM, on April 5th, 1968, the assembly line workers were just finishing up their shift when they got word that Land was on site, and was going to speak to them. Crowding into the cafeteria, few would have expected what he now wanted to talk about.
“Martin Luther King is dead,” Land announced.
He called it a “crisis point in American society,” and explained that he intended to bring more Black workers into Polaroid – across all levels of the company.
DREW THOMPSON, ART HISTORIAN: This is the first public and highly political statement that we see from an individual like Land on the occasion of the assassination of Martin Luther King. And it tells us something, I think, about the ability of an inventor or CEO to really enact change.
NARRATOR: Land’s commitment that morning would soon translate into the recruitment of more Black professionals into Polaroid’s ranks.
CAROLINE HUNTER, POLAROID CHEMIST: I went to Xavier University. I majored in chemistry. I remember we received a pamphlet that included various corporations with job offers, and we just filled that out by hand – if you can imagine. Polaroid was well celebrated within the scientific community and it had a reputation of being liberal, so to me it was an easy decision.
DREW THOMPSON, ART HISTORIAN: To a certain degree, the company itself was a space of social mobility and change. Built into that was I think a kind of notion of social good, and so in some ways that was a testament to Land.
NARRATOR: For Polaroid’s thousands of employees, the name itself could be a point of pride.
ARCHIVAL AUDIO:
EDWIN LAND: We have been writing it without realizing it a tremendous technological symphony. We are one of the strongest companies in the world in terms of those spiritual and intellectual qualities that lead to human strength.
NARRATOR: But the reality was, working for a man as brilliant and as demanding as Edwin Land was never, ever easy.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: It was an unusual place to work in that it was more sort of idealistic and cerebral – and therefore more of a pain in the neck.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: This is a time when people were concerned with getting a job for life, where they were just going to put their heads down, do the hours, come home, have some semblance of family structure. And Polaroid asked far more of you. You somehow could not fit in unless you were willing to just say ‘Polaroid is my everything.’
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: Land was dedicated to his research. When he had a problem that he was working on, it subsumed his life.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: If Edwin Land had an idea in the middle of the night, he’d be calling up saying ‘I need you right now.’
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: He could be abrupt. He could be tough to work with. Social niceties didn’t occur to him. I know in the days when I was there, there were many people who ran around Polaroid scared to death of him.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: His expectation was that you would be there. You often did have to make those choices, and sacrifice family and relationships. And just, yeah. Polaroid was your relationship.
NARRATOR: For better or for worse, Land was the same person at work, and at home – as Terre and his two young daughters knew all too well.
HOLLY FRENCH PERRY, POLAROID RESEARCHER: One time he was taking them to the movies and they stood out on the front porch while he went to the back of the house to get the car. And he got in the car and he drove down to the lab. He went right by them. It tells you something about the way he operated. He was very fond of his wife and his daughters, but his focus was on his work.
NARRATOR: After decades of research, and countless long days and late nights with Meroë Morse and Polaroid’s chemists and engineers, Land’s dreams were finally coming true.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: In 1969, Land created a prototype of what would become SX-70.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: That is what most people most commonly will associate with Polaroid. That little square with the wider border at the bottom where you write notes.
NARRATOR: All along, this was the camera that Land had been building in his mind. At long last, the photographs were in brilliant color, and developed in seconds – no pealing, no coating, no anything required. The SX70 was nothing short of genius.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: Most people when they take their Polaroid picture, they're thinking that this is the masterpiece. From a scientist point of view, this is the masterpiece. So when you press the button, light hits the surface of the film. It starts the process for the negative to be created. You’ve got these sensitive layers that are sensitive to different colors that are activated. And then there’s also layers of dyes – they start to activate right away. All of those things are happening at the same time. And then this exposure exits the camera and then at the bottom of that frame, that’s where the special chemicals that are officially called goo are spread onto the different layers and the reaction starts. In less than 60 seconds you have the image.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: I, like everyone, like to talk about this as a magic trick. Of course, look at it! But it’s actually better than magic because it’s human. This is the product of very, very smart people applying themselves super hard, going at it as hard as they can, working 20-hour days, using science and art together to make something wonderful. And they succeeded. ’Cause it’s not mystical. It’s brains in tangible form.
NARRATOR: It was a triumph, so long sought. Land liked to say that coming up with the idea had taken him an afternoon – and realizing it, almost three decades. It would be another couple of years before the SX70 would be ready for the market, but the experiment had, at long last, succeeded.
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EDWIN LAND: I look forward to the time a few years from now of starting to use, in its accuracy and intricacy, beauty, our long-awaited ultimate camera that is a part of the evolving human being.
NARRATOR: But the truth was, no matter how fast Polaroid rushed the SX70 to market, it wouldn’t be quite soon enough. At the age of only 46, Meroe Morse was losing a battle with cancer.
Up until the very last week of her life, Morse kept working – pushing forward the technology she’d done so much to help create. On July 29th, 1969, Polaroid’s pioneering chemist died.
PARKER SARGENT, FILMMAKER: Land was right there with her in the hospital in her last days. He was losing someone he considered his scientific soulmate. For Edwin Land, the things that you loved and the things that you cherished were few and far between. And so that must have been very difficult.
NARRATOR: At Polaroid, work had to go on, although for the rest of his life Land would keep Morse’s office untouched, exactly as she’d left it. Land was on the cusp of achieving everything he’d ever dreamed of, but in reality, America’s most successful living inventor was, more than ever, alone.
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T minus 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. Ignition. Liftoff.
NARRATOR: As the years rolled on, and the Cold War heated up, as busy as Land was with Polaroid, he was increasingly leading a double life.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: Land was the CIA’s number one consultant on the issue of surveillance and technology. He developed the U2 spy plane. When America was ready to put up its first spy satellites, he was in charge of the technology. And he continued to work with the military, with the CIA throughout his career. It was sort of like Superman and Clark Kent: privacy, reclusiveness, you know, cautiousness, on the one hand, but the Barnum and Bailey showman on the other hand, who has the next great technological advance that he wants to show the world.
NARRATOR: Land’s secret work never got in the way of his business. But by the early 1970s, he’d sunk so much capital into making Polaroid independent – and cutting any need for Kodak’s help or film – that his company was now precariously leveraged on churning out a steady stream of successful new products.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: Polaroid has been used from pornography to dentistry and literally everything in between.
NARRATOR: From high fashion to cutting-edge medicine, Polaroid had never been more places at once. The full array of its applications, and the devices it now produced, quite simply boggled the mind.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: Now Polaroid decided that it was going to make this wonderful camera that would be great for governments. It was called the ID2.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: The ID-2 is a 23 kilo hulk of a camera. And it only does one thing: it takes passport photographs.
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MAN: Sit right back, please.
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This advanced method known as the Polaroid-Land Identification System simplifies the procedure of identifying people by providing speed and accuracy.
NARRATOR: But the simplicity of the ID-2’s processing meant that it was tailor-made to be a wholly different kind of tool – as two Polaroid employees, Caroline Hunter and Ken Williams, were about to find out.
CAROLINE HUNTER, POLAROID CHEMIST: I’m at Polaroid, we’re going to lunch, and we turn around and look at the bulletin board and there was a mock-up of an ID card that says ‘Department of the Mines, Union of South Africa.’ Ken says, ‘Wow, I didn’t know Polaroid was in South Africa.’ And that was the beginning.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: See, this is 1970. 1969, the year before, the UN says, no company, no country, should interact with South Africa. It had an oppressive, white supremacist regime. And so Caroline and Ken spent two weeks in the Cambridge library. And this is what they find out. Every Black South African had to carry with them a passbook. A passbook is a 20-page document that could tell where this person could go, and where this person could not go. At the heart of this passbook was a picture created by Polaroid.
NARRATOR: Polaroid had neither hidden – nor advertised – its business in South Africa. Most Americans – even most Polaroid employees – quite simply knew nothing about it.
CAROLINE HUNTER, POLAROID CHEMIST: Obviously we were horrified. We realized, if our labor’s being used for this, we have to do something about it.
NARRATOR: In October, Hunter and Williams launched a grassroots movement – only a few months later, they were speaking about Polaroid at the United Nations.
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KEN WILLIAMS: I want to say right on, brothers, I’m very proud to be here.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: They were incredibly successful. They called for a full boycott in 1970, and that spread all over the world like wildfire.
NARRATOR: Now, everywhere Land went, his speaking engagements were disrupted by protesters.
CAROLINE HUNTER, POLAROID CHEMIST: We decided we were going to protest Land’s presence as the guest speaker at this international convention of American scientists. So when he gets on the stage and he has this exchange with Ken, they talk about Polaroid in South Africa. Land is very upset. He says, “Well, I hire more black people than anybody else.” And he rambles on with all of the apologies that the South African government makes for Apartheid.
NARRATOR: As the boycott threatened Polaroid’s image – and its sales during the busy holiday season – Land was asked what he thought about South Africa. “The reason why I’m mad,” he replied, “is because [these protestors] are interfering with my personal goals.”
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: You’re not speaking about someone who’s always ethically minded. You’re talking about someone who is driven by the technology, by doing the things that people thought were impossible. For him it wasn’t about ethics, it was about the product. It wasn’t about whether something was right or wrong. So anyone that was standing in the way – damaging the reputation – it was just barking up the wrong tree.
NARRATOR: By the spring of 1971, Polaroid had fired both Ken Williams and Caroline Hunter. But they refused to give up, and in the end, Polaroid would bow to public pressure, and stop conducting business in South Africa.
For his part, Land never took responsibility for Polaroid’s involvement with the Apartheid regime.
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EDWIND LAND: Perhaps in life there is no such thing as an explicit correct choice. I don’t know.
CAROLINE HUNTER, POLAROID CHEMIST: We said to people, what are you gonna support? What do you believe in? But for Edwin Land he pretended South Africa wasn’t there. He pretended he had no role in supporting Apartheid.
NARRATOR: By the end of the controversy, Land was still as powerful as ever. But some illusions – and some ideals – had been forever shattered. “Don’t kid yourself,” one employee remarked, “Polaroid is a one-man company.”
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NEWS ANCHOR: The Polaroid Corporation plans to put an instant movie picture system on the market later on this year. Yesterday the company showed the system to its stockholders.
NARRATOR: From the very beginning, Polaroid’s guiding star had been Land’s seemingly mystical ability to divine and deliver the next piece of tech that Americans didn’t even know they wanted.
And now he’d given the world this thing called Polavision.
PARKER SARGENT, FILMMAKER: Is Polavision what America needed? Edwin Land certainly thought it was.
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EDWIND LAND: Not many people can see that something is significant until after it is done. And we have become expert in sensing way ahead of time what is necessary, what is desirable, what will be enjoyable.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: So many people said to Land that Polavision was a terrible idea. They could foresee all of the problems with the product. It wasn’t great quality. It’s meant to be portable. The “portable processor.” It’s really not very portable.
DREW THOMPSON, ART HISTORIAN: It can’t quite record sound. It’s kind of like a silent film.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: It was a really quite ridiculous product.
NARRATOR: Times were changing. For almost half a century, Polaroid had driven that change. But, now, things were different.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: Land was increasingly sort of out of touch with what the consumer wanted, or needed, where almost any idea that he would come up with was something that was worth pursuing.
PARKER SARGENT, FILMMAKER: As you age, you don’t want to be told you don't know what people want. You don't want to be told this isn’t it.
NARRATOR: At Polaroid, employees had once called Land “the boy genius.” But he wasn’t a boy any longer. With its stock in freefall, there were rumblings that Land should step down. All his financial gambles – once the very measure of his success – seemed to be finally catching up with him.
And the news just kept getting worse. Since the debut of the Model 95 back in 1948, Polaroid had always been alone in the instant photography market. No longer.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: In 1976, Kodak finally did it. They introduced a line of instant cameras and film. The camera produced a picture that came out with a white tab at the bottom, and again, right out of the camera.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: Land took this very personally.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: He said, “I'm disappointed in them. They have all these resources, all the money in the world, they’re 10 times our size, all these smart people working for them, and all they could do was rip us off.”
NARRATOR: From now on, the full force of his Land’s intellect – and the entirety of his focus – would be devoted to a new singular task: taking Kodak to court, and making them pay.
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NEWSCASTER: The patent suits could take years to resolve. At stake is the six billion dollar American photographic business.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: From the very beginnings of the trial, Land was turning up every single day at court.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: It was his cause. It was his company, it was his work, it was his passion. It was all on trial there.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: It was righteousness. He did not just want a settlement where Kodak paid a fee every year. He wanted Kodak out of the business. The lawyers kept saying, “We could work this out.” And he said, “No, I want an injunction.”
NARRATOR: Over the course of the entire trial, Land’s attention never wavered, the minutia of the proceedings obsessing him as just completely as any laboratory mystery once had.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: Instead of delegating the case to a very capable team of lawyers, Land felt that no one else could fight in Polaroid’s corner better than he could. He was not doing anything else. So the company just like a ship without a captain.
NARRATOR: By the 1980s, instant photography remained as popular as ever, but the company that had started it all was struggling to survive. And even good news just couldn’t right the ship.
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NEWSCASTER: The legal action was as complex as the cameras, but there was nothing instant about the outcome. So today Kodak conceded defeat. Their cameras and films being removed this morning from stores right across America.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: Kodak actually had to pull all of its camera and film out of the stores even though 13 million Americans already had them.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: They had a big picnic at Polaroid headquarters. They had T-shirts made up. They won. They won, they won. And by then it’s incredibly sad because it was already… They may not have grasped that it was already over, that this fight had been irrelevant.
NARRATOR: In Cambridge, the once unimaginable had come to pass. Edwin Land had been pushed out of Polaroid. His retirement made headlines across the nation. The company he’d founded and led for almost half a century would not last long without him.
NARRATOR: As Polaroid’s influence faded, Americans seemed to move on, falling in love with a whole new kind of magic machine.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: So much digital technology has come along, and taken away the kind of reasons for Polaroid for being. But in actual fact, I think there are very few things in life that are as magical as watching a Polaroid image develop in your hand. There’s this little bit of alchemy that makes this beautiful object, which forever ties you to the moment. That’s the magic that just endures and will endure forever.
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EDWIND LAND: To take a good picture, you must open your eyes, open your heart, and just look.
RON FIERSTEIN, WRITER: I’m constantly in awe of Edwin Land, and what he accomplished in one lifetime.
HOLLY FRENCH PERRY, POLAROID RESEARCHER: Everything that was new was interesting to him. What ideas he was creating, and what he saw for the future – it was just thrilling and exciting.
CAROLINE HUNTER, POLAROID CHEMIST: Land’s story is a critical American story, but it has to be told to the full truth of who he was, what he did, and the impact of all of his work, good and bad.
DREW THOMPSON, ART HISTORIAN: Land really believed at its core that Polaroid could do good by giving people control to capture their image, but he struggled when the need to do social good intersected with the realities of of running a company.
NARRATOR: Through it all, Land’s focus was always on his work, on how his next invention might have the power to change people’s lives.
CHRIS BONANOS, WRITER: Land had this idea that you would document your whole life in pictures and your family’s whole life in pictures.
RHIANNON ADAM, ARTIST: I think if we were to gather all the Polaroids ever taken and we were to put them in one place, we’d actually be able to see a much more nuanced view of humanity. There was no editing, there was no cropping out of that person that you didn’t like.
AINISSA RAMIREZ, SCIENTIST: Polaroid was in the business of making us more human. I mean, instant photography is such a personal thing, because when I take a picture of someone I just saw a moment ago, we’re focusing on things that are going on in the present, but we’re also focused on things that are in the past. Most of us can’t be time travelers, but I think that’s the magic of a Polaroid pictures.
