For decades he would try to sell his synthetic polarizers to the auto industry. Land returned to Harvard, but dropped out again to form a start-up company with his physics instructor – first in Cambridge, then in a dairy barn in Waltham, Mass. Polaroid’s most successful product, the Land instant camera It would also draw Land into the field of instant photography. That discovery - of a teenaged college dropout - would later take the form of inexpensive polarizers used in hundreds of millions of calculators, watches, camera filters, sunglasses and microscopes. The moment Land turned an electromagnet onto suspended crystals and watched transmitted light turn from white to black was “the most exciting single event in my life.” With financial support from his father, Land moved to New York City and spent long hours doing research in the New York Public Library, his own small apartment and Columbia University’s physics laboratory.įinally he hit on a method of dissolving tiny crystals in a sheet of nitrocellulose lacquer and aligning them in a magnetic field. He dropped out after his freshman year to try to invent the synthetic polarizer that Cap Girden told him the world needed. Land’s on-again, off-again relationship with Harvard began when he was 17. “The Most Exciting Single Event in My Life” Along the way, he would successfully commercialize his cutting-edge technology in myriad products.ĭin Land with a Polaroid instant photo, 1971. Land would spend his next decades in an obsessive quest to put synthetic polarizers on automobile headlights. That led to a discussion back at camp about the need to boost headlights’ intensity – and to reduce glare to make nighttime driving safer. Their headlights were so dim they nearly ran into a team of horses hitched to a farm wagon. That summer, Land was driving at night with a Camp Mooween counselor. And it was Girden who told Din Land of the need for a synthetic material that would polarize light as it passed through. Girden taught him to use polarizing photometers, which can measure the intensity of a beam of daylight as compared with a beam that has a steady, predetermined intensity. Land attributed the entire direction of his career to Girden’s demonstration of polarization. One day at the camp, Girden showed him how a Nicol prism – a filter fashioned from a clear calcite crystal – screened light waves to eliminate the glare from a tabletop. A Growing Fascination With Polarizationĭin Land was already intrigued by light when he arrived at Camp Moowen, but it was Girden who inspired his enthusiasm for polarization. Many of the camp’s alumni would return year after year for a reunion, well after Camp Mooween had disappeared. The camp’s alumnae include Yip Harburg, who wrote Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and Julius Silver, a founder of Brandeis University and lifelong advisor to Land. Or he’d point to a single fern and turn it into a fascinating story about history, dinosaurs and the origin of coal. He would wake them in the middle of the night to watch a thunderstorm and explain why it was the greatest show on earth. Girden’s enthusiasm for science and nature profoundly influenced the boys who attended Camp Mooween. The New York Times called him “a minor-league inventor and major-league finagler whose business acumen was as absent as the funds to cover most of his checks.” Weekly would dub Girden a “nutty professor” for his ideas to eliminate smog. It was a Roaring ‘20s version of nerd camp founded recently by the charismatic Cap Girden. Two years later, Din went to Camp Mooween in nearby Lebanon. In 1919, the Lands moved to 1 Crescent St. Land’s father Harry, a prosperous businessman, disposed of scrap metal from Electric Boat. When they arrived in the United States, they learned they had “landed.” They misunderstood and registered themselves as “Lands.” Otherwise, the Polaroid Land Camera probably would have had a different name – and probably not Solomonovich. His grandparents, Avram and Ella Solomonovich, had fled the Ukraine to escape anti-Semitism. Bridgeport BeginningsĮdwin Herbert “Din” Land was born on in Bridgeport, Conn. Steve Jobs called Land his boyhood hero and inspiration. He set the prototype for the successful Silicon Valley startup. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Land took Polaroid to the forefront of the affirmative action movement. When he faced stiff competition for scientific talent, he hired women from Smith College’s art department. Land was not only a brilliant inventor, but a business pioneer. Andy Warhol with a Polaroid print portrait, by Bernard Gotfryd.
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