Edwin Land^©

"An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail."

Edwin Land

Jewish persecution in Czarist Russia led Avram and Ella Salmonovitch to flee Odessa for the United States in the 1880s with their three sons, Harry, Sam and Louis. Like millions of fellow immigrants, they left New York's Castle Garden emigrant processing station with new names. They were now Abraham and Ella Land. The five Lands were soon joined by two more brothers and three sisters and, in a fashion typical of striving immigrant Jews, they soon achieved what they could not in Russia. Among the siblings, two boys became lawyers, a third traded secondhand machinery and Harry followed his father into the scrap metal business. The three daughters married a lawyer, an architect and a retailer.

Harry moved his business to Norwich Connecticut and began processing most of the scrap metal from the Electric Boat Company, which builds submarines. He married Matha Goldfaden, had a daughter, Helen, and four years later, on May 7, 1909, a son, Edwin Herbert. Helen soon nicknamed her little brother "Din". It was a nickname that would stick for the rest of his life.

As a child, kaleidoscopes and stereopticons fascinated Din. He read everything he could find on optics, including the leading technical treatise of the era, Robert Wood Johnson's Physical Optics. Land said he slept with it under his pillow and read it, "like a Bible." At 13, he became fascinated with the phenomenon of polarization when a camp counselor used a piece of Iceland spar, the mineral calcite, to stop the glare reflecting from a tabletop.

One evening's near collision of an automobile and a farmer's wagon made him realize the risk of headlight glare blinding oncoming drivers. This became the first in a lifetime of problems that Land would focus his energies to solve.

He entered Harvard in 1926 but, intrigued with the potential of polarization to solve the glare problem, he dropped out after only a few months to read everything he could find on the problem. Like Thomas Edison before him, he studied the extensive material in the New York Public Library. His goal was to create an inexpensive, thin polarizer to filter light from auto headlamps.

If it worked, he knew there would be many other applications. He explored numerous techniques, including a failed effort to resolve problems that daunted an earlier expert, William B. Herapath. Ultimately, Land came up with a new solution. He envisioned placing billions of needle-like light crystals, smaller than the wavelength of light, onto a sheet of film and using magnetic fields to align them so that only polarized light would pass through the film. By 1929 he had perfected the technique and his patent was filed.

Land then returned to Harvard where his work and knowledge so impressed the head of the physics laboratory that he was assigned his own lab. Three years later, he became the only Harvard undergraduate ever to deliver a seminar to the physics department. His topic was "A New Polarizer for Light in the Form of an Extensive Synthetic Sheet." Impatient as always, and this time joined by his physics instructor, George Wheelwright III, Land dropped out of Harvard for a second and last time in 1932.

Though Land could have gone to work in the laboratories of many of America's leading corporations, he opted instead for the autonomy of running his own show. Together, the two formed Land-Wheelwright Laboratories and began manufacturing and commercializing the new product. By 1934, Kodak had signed on as the first customer using the polarizing film in camera filters. American Optical followed a year later, incorporating the filters into sunglasses. Meanwhile, General Motors and General Electric were exploring other applications. Land was not yet 24. In 1937, they renamed their company, Polaroid Corporation, and in 1939, their polarizers were used to view 3-D movies at the New York World's Fair.

Prospects for ever hotter, more intense headlamps and the heavy demands of wear from wind, rain, dust, and the sun caused Land to invent yet other new kinds of polarizers using dyes rather than crystals. With collaborator, Joseph Mahler, he also created a new technology for making and viewing photographs in 3-D, which they named Vectographs.

Ironically, while Land's filters were incorporated into a huge number of profitable applications, they were never used in cars. After ten years of research on polarization, the industry chose to use headlight dimmers.

With the advent of World War II, Polaroid devoted itself to wartime production. Its vectographs were used for battlefield aerial surveys, including those for Normandy and Guadalcanal. Its polarizers helped reduce gun-sight and tank-telescope glare, and its goggles were used for fighting day and night. The war also established Land as a leading scientist to be called on by Congress and the President to aid in America's defense.

In 1944, Land's three-year old daughter became frustrated when she could not see the photograph immediately after her picture was taken. It spurred him to apply his energies to the intriguing problem of instant photography. In a technique that was his hallmark, once he recognized the problem, he quickly conceived a solution and then applied himself relentlessly to filling in the steps between the idea and the solution. "You always start with a fantasy," he said. "Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with experiments, you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components. Ever pragmatic, Land later said, "If you sense a deep human need, then you go back to . . . science. . . . You make the system fulfill that need, rather than starting the other way around where you have something and wonder what to do with it."

By February 1947, he had demonstrated his new camera, and on November 26,1948, the Polaroid Land camera went on sale in downtown Boston's Jordon Marsh for $89.75. He followed up with ever faster, smaller, single-lens reflex and color cameras that were continuously refined and improved.

During the early 1950s, Land began working directly with President Eisenhower as head of the Intelligence Section of Eisenhower's Technological Capabilities Panel. The section conceived the U-2 program, using planes with cameras for spying and the subsequent satellite imaging systems, including the cameras and techniques for high-altitude photography and intelligence gathering.

Ever charming and persuasive, Land helped golfer Eisenhower understand the benefits by telling him it would be like seeing a golf ball at 2,000 yards. Land's inventive talents were so ubiquitous that he even helped Kelly Johnson, head of Lockheed's famed Skunkworks which worked secretly to develop new planes, to design the U-2 wing. Together, they conceived an elegant way to reduce heat on the wing's leading edge by funneling the fuel, chilled by the high altitude, past the wings edge.

The technique also warmed the fuel, thinning it to its required viscosity. In part for these efforts, Land received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963. Akin to the Congressional Medal of Honor, it is the highest honor granted to a civilian.

Land continued his contributions to science, education and defense for more than thirty years serving Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and later Nixon. Nixon was the only one Land came to despise. In a commencement address following the U-2 disaster, Land revealed his passion for truth. He acknowledged Eisenhower's acceptance of full responsibility and for having told the truth.

In Land's view being truthful was something, "in our country, the leader must do at all cost despite the consequences and advantages our adversaries often gained by disinformation." As colleague and author James R. Killian, Jr. put it, ". . . it was clear that absolute integrity underlay this man of genius and vision. I don't believe Din Land would have been happy with the lack of respect for truth in more recent administrations."

During Watergate, Land resigned his post as Presidential advisor. When told he had been listed as one of Nixon's 200 enemies, he responded that he was "particularly honored as it was the only honor he had received without working for it."

Land's most famous failure was a product of his inventive genius and relentless determination. Seeing the need for instant movies, he invented Polaroid's instant movie process. It cost millions and was a huge technical success. What Land had not understood was that videotape, arriving on the market at nearly the same time, was a cheaper and in some ways better product. The failure led to Land's resignation from Polaroid.

He went on to explore the phenomenon of light and vision. In the process, he developed his own theories of how color is perceived within the eye's retina and the brain's cortex. He called his theory "Retinex."

In the 1980s, he showed his passion for individual contributions to progress by using personal funds to establish and endow the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge Massachusetts. It still provides fellowships for young scientists to support their experiments. As he said in a 1957 MIT speech: "Group research must not take over. In a democracy, one must cooperate, but democracy's "peculiar gift is to develop each individual into everything he might be. "If the dream of personal greatness died," he said, "democracy loses the real source of its future strength."

Land was devoted to the advancement of science and learning. In 1963 he said "Science . . . is a technique to keep yourself from kidding yourself." He personally endowed the building of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also gave an anonymous $12.5 million grant to Harvard for its Science Center. His purpose was to give undergraduates access to better facilities to convince more of them to become interested in science.

Land died on March 1, 1991. In the end, he proved a Renaissance man of science. He is America's second most prolific inventor with 535 patents to his name. Only Thomas Edison has more. Though he never graduated, he received at least 10 honorary doctorates, including one from Harvard where he had been a student.

He was admitted as a fellow of England's Royal Society, was a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, and served as President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As a member of the Carnegie Commission, he helped establish public television. Taken together, Land was an exceptional achiever. He was a prolific inventor and scientist, a successful entrepreneur, an advisor to Presidents and Congress, a benefactor of education, and a firm believer in truth.