Word: polaroiding
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...result, Polaroid stock is one of the favorite glamour issues on Wall Street. Anyone who invested $1,000 in the company in 1938 today has stock worth $3,575,000. Indeed, an investment of $1,000 in Polaroid ten years ago has grown to at least $4,750. The shares held by Land and his family, who control 15% of the total, are worth about half a billion dollars, probably making him the world's richest scientist...
...success, Land was convinced as early as 1963 that if Polaroid owners could get a small, easily portable, nonmessy instant-picture camera, they would buy huge numbers of them -and far more of Polaroid's high-profit film than they now do. Thus, Land undertook the greatest camera quest of his career: development of the SX-70. "The program to create our new camera was like a siren," he says. "She never came clean to say whether she meant to succeed or not, but she never let us escape...
Land originally wanted to design a camera that did not have to be unfolded before becoming usable. But after testing several mockups, including one that electronically scanned the picture area, he decided that the negative needed for Polaroid photography was too large for any lens that could not be extended outward simply by a bellows. By the time he returned to the concept of a pop-out model, two years had been lost...
...time was probably gained back by moments of sheer inspiration, scientific and otherwise. While searching for a small but powerful motor to run the new camera, a Polaroid engineer had the unusual insight one afternoon that the motors used to run his son's toy race cars might work. The next day Polaroid researchers invaded a Boston hobby shop and eventually modeled the SX-70 motor on an electric-train engine that they spotted there. While mulling over the complaint of a Polaroid owner, who had phoned all the way from Africa to protest that he could not find...
...took another nine years for Land to perfect the polarizing process and decide how it could be marketed. As with most of his other projects, Land tried to start big. In 1937 he set up the Polaroid Corp. in a former tobacco wholesaler's building on Boston's Columbus Avenue with the plan of selling Detroit's automakers on the idea of putting his polarizers in the sun visors and headlights of all new cars. Land was convinced that the reduced glare would make night driving much safer. But manufacturers noted that the polarizing sheets deteriorated when...