#133 Edwin Land (Polaroid and The Man Who Invented It)

**David Senra** (0:00)
Polaroid as a company was for 45 years virtually synonymous with Edwin Land. He was its founder. He invented its first products and indeed many of its products and processes throughout the five decades of the company's history. His titles during most of the period from 1937 to 1982, included chairman of the board, president, chief executive officer, chief operating officer, and director of research.
Although he cultivated a legend of privacy and inaccessibility to the press, he remained far and away the best-known member of the company. For many years, the only one familiar to the public.
He stayed aloof from the company's advertising, so long as his friends and intimates told him Polaroid's advertising was good. The moment he suspected it was verging on the mediocre, he descended from Olympus, clothed in a mantle of righteousness.
Since for many years advertising was included among my marketing responsibilities at Polaroid, my relationship with Land was alternatively very close and moderately distant.
I always felt comfortable speaking my mind to him. Many of his employees did not. He was revered to an extraordinary extent by most of the people who worked for him. Most men of Land's stature, particularly those of whom great success has come in the business world, earned their share of distractors. Land's were primarily outside the company, principally in the ranks of financial analysts and reporters.
Land did not earn a college degree, yet he has received more medals in scientific honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science, than most living Americans.
The full list of his honors runs to three pages. He holds 533 patents, second only to Thomas Edison's 1093, and he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
I joined Polaroid in 1958 with little knowledge of the company, but with a sense that I was embarking on an adventure.
I began in advertising and promotion. In 1980, I became executive vice president and was given responsibility for technical and industrial photography. In 1982, Land cut ties with his company and retired to devote full time to his laboratory and foundation.
Two months later, I left Polaroid as well. The subject of this book is Polaroid and Land. The span is 1926 to 1982, the period when the company and the man were inseparable, virtually indistinguishable.
That was an excerpt from the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is Land's Polaroid, A Company and The Man Who Invented It, and it was written by Peter Wensberg. This is now the fourth book that I've read about Edwin Land, and I think it has the most unique perspective out of any other book that I've read so far, because Peter worked directly with Edwin Land for over 20 years. So we get insights and perspectives that are not contained in the other book. If you want to learn more, I encourage you to listen to Founders No. 40, which is about the books insisting on The Impossible and instant story of Polaroid. And then last week, Founders No. 132, which is on the book The Instant Image, which is also a biography of Edwin Land. So I want to start right with something that Peter wrote in the prologue. And let me read this to you, and then I'll tell you how I interpret this. It says, Land's life seemed to be primarily a life of the mind. His great dramas were largely self-created, played on the stage of Polaroid, which he constructed for himself. If those productions did not begin or end as the supporting cast would have them, it was a small matter to the principal player.
His interest in our reactions was minimal, polite, sometimes kind, but limited by the great drain of energy necessary to sustain his own part. When I first came across that paragraph, I thought it was really a reinforcement of why reading biographies is so important. All of the people that you and I are studying on this podcast created their own world within the world. Another way to think about that is they were the stars of their own movie. In this case, he's using the metaphor being the star in your own play. Then when I finished the book, I realized that's not a complete explanation. A complete explanation of why this activity is so important. When I got to the end of the book and it sinks in, that the life story, not only is the book over, but the life story of Edwin Land is over. He's no longer with us.
His ideas live on. His story lives on. The author is no longer with us. I looked up and read his obituary right after I finished reading the book, and it just exacerbated this bittersweet, melancholic feeling that I've talked about multiple times, that you just realize that that path lies before all of us.