Word: instantly
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...film factory in the Dutch town of Enschede shut down in June 2008, it seemed to signal the end for one of the most ingenious and iconic innovations of the 20th century. Almost 60 years after American inventor Edwin H. Land sold the first Model 95 of his new instant-picture camera in Boston in November 1948, the troubled Polaroid Corp. halted its cassette-film production for good. Demand was still relatively high - the plant churned out 30 million cassettes in 2007 and 24 million in the first half of 2008 - but the plant had run out of its allocated...
...attending the factory's closing ceremony had other ideas. Florian Kaps, an Austrian entrepreneur and Polaroid enthusiast, and André Bosman, until then the engineering manager of the Enschede plant, met by chance on that fateful day. Together they decided to find a way to bring instant photography back to life. (See "Who We Were: America in Snapshots...
...quickly agreed that there was a great market opportunity for a new instant film," remembers Kaps, who switched tracks after getting a biology Ph.D. to enter the retro-photography business. First he worked as an executive with the Lomographical Society, founded in Vienna in 1992 to celebrate the Russian Lomo camera, a very basic snapper that conquered some bohemian corners of the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then, four years ago, Kaps fell in love with Polaroid and founded a company specializing in selling equipment for analog instant photography. An official partner of Polaroid, the company still...
...traditional Polaroid film. They founded a company named Impossible, leased a small building on the site of the closed Enschede plant, secured some key production machinery and hired nine former Polaroid employees to come up with new formulas for both a monochrome and a color version of the instant film. The new films would have unique characteristics but still maintain some of the best bits of Polaroid, like the square shape, the white frame and that familiar warm chemical smell. Since then, the impossible has become the highly likely. "Two weeks ago, we cleared the last of about five major...
...Still in the experimental stage, Impossible's instant pictures have a look that's reminiscent of the early days of photography, "but this will be part of their charm," says Kaps. While the company is still in negotiations with Polaroid over the use of the Polaroid name, it has been given permission to make film that will work in Polaroid cameras. The trial monochrome version of the film will go into production at the end of October and, if all goes according to plan, should be available to the masses in time for Christmas, "before people start to throw away...