Wensberg captured the enormity of it all in his 1987 book Land’s Polaroid: No two estimates of the total cost of the project seem to be the same, but they’re all in the hundreds of millions of dollars. “The virtual cascade of revolutions, mechanical, optical and electronic, that made the SX-70 possible,” rhapsodized a Polaroid brochure, “had only one purpose: to free you from everything cumbersome and tedious about picture-taking, so that it could become at last the simple creative act it should be.” Edwin Land himself reportedly said that the SX-70 incorporated 20,000 technological breakthroughs (we can forgive him if he estimated on the high side). The cover of Polaroid’s SX-70 brochure didn’t demonstrate any false modesty. It was the first camera to realize what Edwin Land said had been his dream all along: “absolute one-step photography.” Most important, unlike any other Polaroid, the SX-70 asked the photographer to do nothing more than focus, press the shutter, and pluck the snapshot as it emerged from the camera–and then watch it develop in daylight. Unlike any previous Polaroid, it built the battery into the film pack. Even the flash–in the form of a Polaroid invention called a flashbar that packed ten bulbs into a double-sided array–was custom-designed for the SX-70. Unlike any previous Polaroid, it folded up into a 1″-thick leather-encased brick that was (just barely) pocketable. Unlike any previous Polaroid, it was a single-lens reflex (SLR) model with a viewfinder that showed exactly what you’d get. The existence of previous instant cameras only helped emphasize what a great leap forward the SX-70 was. ![]() It is, if anything is worth doing it’s worth doing to excess. There’s a rule they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School. ![]() His invention–for decades to come, all Polaroid models would be officially known as “Land Cameras”–attracted enormous attention, and the company thrived as it introduced new, improved models throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Land unveiled the Model 95, the company’s first camera. In 1972, instant photography was no longer a novelty: the world had been introduced to it in 1947 when Polaroid co-founder Edwin H. We ranked the SX-70 eighth on that 2005 list, but the sheer magnitude of its ambition and innovation dwarfs the Walkman, iPod, and nearly every other consumer-electronics product you can name. Clarke’s Third Law: making technology indistinguishable from magic. By that measure, I can’t think of a greater gadget than the SX-70 Land Camera, the instant camera that Polaroid introduced in April 1972. Maybe it has more to do with the concept expressed by Arthur C. The invention consisted of a transparent polymer material for coating sheets of film or other materials the polymer consisted of billions of microscopic crystals per centimeter and the alignment of these crystals changed the polarization.The SX-70–specifically, the SX-70 which I bought at an antique store in Redwood City, California in April of 2011.īut greatness isn’t a popularity contest–not primarily one, at least. By 1928 Land was back at Harvard, however, and soon filed a patent for polarizing refracting bodies. Land entered Harvard in the fall of 1926 but, impatient to find an efficient means of manufacturing his idea, he left after just a few months. ![]() He believed it possible to reduce the glare, however, by introducing a polarizing effect. Land believed that vehicle headlights needed to be stronger but knew that stronger headlights blinded oncoming drivers. ![]() It happened when an automobile he was riding in nearly hit a wagon at night. It was while at camp that he first grasped the idea of polarization. Land’s patent for Polarizing Refracting Bodies, filed April 26, 1929Īs a boy Edwin Land became fascinated with kaleidoscopes and the properties of light.
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