who developed the polaroid camera

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who developed the polaroid camera?

-- Kevin Zukerman (baileysfam@juno.com), March 22, 2000

Answers

Polaroids are light filters. Normally, light coming at you vibrates in two directions -- say left-right and up-down. The Polaroids remove light that vibrates in one of the directions. We knew about polarization 180 years ago. Then around 1930 several things happened. A woman named Helen Maislen studied physics at Smith College. Her professor there coined the term Polaroid. Soon she married Edwin Land, a young physics student who'd been turned on by courses at Norwich College. Land went on to Harvard. But he got so engrossed with polarization that he dropped out. In 1937 Land formed a company to produce a new polarizing plastic. Of course he named it Polaroid. By 1943 he was a 34-year-old business wunderkind -- now on vacation in Santa Fe. When he took snapshots of his family, his three-year-old daughter complained, "Why do we have to wait so long to see the pictures?" Why indeed! That afternoon Land walked through the old town chewing on the question. We shouldn't have to wait. During that walk, he invented the Polaroid Camera in his head. The camera was based on a new film that developed and printed immediately. At first Land got sepia images. By 1950 he had a black-and-white system. He'd invented a color Polaroid camera by 1959, and it was on the market in 1963. Of course, these Polaroid cameras had nothing to do with polarized light. Land had gone off in an entirely new direction. By the late '60s, half the households in America had Polaroid cameras of one sort or another. When Land retired in 1982 he was a 73-year-old billionaire with 533 p

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), March 22, 2000.

Nobody developed Polaroids, they're self-developing. :-)

-- The masked informer (green.lantern@dc.net), March 23, 2000.

ow! ugh! pain, pain...

that was bad. :)

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), March 23, 2000.


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