Word: polaroiding
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Clumsily paraphrasing the poet at Polaroid Corp.'s annual meeting last week, Chairman Edwin Land said that "to the rest of the photographic industry, instant photography is a thing apart. To Polaroid, it is the whole of life." By "the rest" of the industry, Land meant Eastman'Kodak, which six days earlier had introduced two instant-picture cameras of its own (TIME, May 3), threatening Polaroid with its first serious competition since Land invented instant photography three decades ago. Though Kodak's entry had long been anticipated, Land viewed it as an illegal incursion on turf that...
...suit, filed at literally the last minute (4:59 p.m.) in Boston's U.S. District Court the day before both Polaroid and Kodak held their annual meetings, charges Kodak with violating ten Polaroid patents for instant film and cameras-two of them filed by Land personally. Along with triple damages, the suit asks the court to block Kodak from selling its cameras, which it had planned to do starting this month in Canada and late next month...
Prancing and gesturing in front of a giant photograph of Renoir's painting The Dance at Bougival (taken by an experimental Polaroid camera that reproduces works of art with startling fidelity), Land put on a virtuoso performance for the stockholders. He passionately defended the U.S. patent system: "We took nothing from anybody. We gave a great deal to the world. The only thing keeping us alive is our brilliance. The only thing that keeps our brilliance alive is our patents." He' twitted Kodak's new camera, saying that "the new group would like to confine...
Kodak has been toying with instant-photography technology for at least 20 years: "plywood Brownie" was the name of a laboratory exposure system for Kodak's instant films. (Polaroid has the same flair for nostalgia; SX 70 was the code designation for the research project that led to its first instant-picture camera in 1947.) But Kodak got cracking only in the 1960s, when Polaroid began rapidly lowering the prices of its instant cameras. Kodak's cameras have been put together since January on a 600-ft. assembly line in Kodak Park in Rochester; the development effort involved...
Whatever the outcome of Kodak v. Polaroid, it will be a contest between friends. Kodak manufactured much of Polaroid's film up until 1974. Forever fearful of antitrust actions, Kodak officials were privately delighted to let Polaroid start the instant business. Polaroid Founder Edwin Land has been grateful to Kodak for other reasons. In the 1930s, when Polaroid was a tiny company making light-polarizing sheets (that eventually evolved into the popular sunglasses), Eastman Kodak was among its first customers. Without that deal, there quite possibly would have been no Polaroid instant camera for Kodak to challenge last week...