Edwin Land: The Inventor Steve Jobs Modeled Himself On, and the Company That Forgot Him

In the summer of 1943, on a family vacation in Santa Fe, a thirty-four-year-old American scientist named Edwin Land took a photograph of his three-year-old daughter Jennifer. After he pressed the shutter, she asked him a question that almost no one of her generation had reason to ask, because the answer had always been the same: Why can't I see the picture now? Land had no good answer. The photographic chemistry of 1943 required film to be sent away to a laboratory, processed in a darkroom across multiple chemical baths, and returned days or weeks later. There was no way to see the picture immediately.

The walk Land took that afternoon, alone, while thinking through his daughter's question, has been described in essentially every account of his life as the moment instant photography was invented. By the time he returned to the rented house, he had worked out, in his head, the basic optical and chemical architecture of a camera that would develop its own film inside the camera body, in less than a minute, with no separate processing step. The technology that would make this possible — multilayer instant film containing all the necessary chemistry, packed into a sheet that would develop on contact — would take him five years to actually build. It went on sale in November 1948 as the Polaroid Land Camera Model 95.

The company Land had founded — first as Land-Wheelwright Laboratories in 1932 with a Harvard physics instructor named George Wheelwright, then reorganised as the Polaroid Corporation in 1937 — would, on the strength of the instant-camera franchise, become one of the most consistently profitable consumer-electronics companies of the twentieth century. By the early 1970s, Polaroid was the most innovative company in American consumer technology, the most desired employer for science graduates of MIT and Caltech, and the company most often cited by a young Steve Jobs as the model he wanted Apple to become.

Within fifteen years of Land's death in 1991, Polaroid had filed for bankruptcy twice, the second time as a casualty of a 3.65 billion dollar Ponzi scheme being run by its then-owner, and the company's name had been sold to a brand-licensing firm for less than ninety million dollars.

The man who held 535 patents

Edwin Herbert Land was born in 1909 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of a Russian-Jewish scrap-metal dealer. He enrolled at Harvard in 1926 and withdrew the following year, at age eighteen, to move to New York and pursue his own work in the polarisation of light. The polarisation problem he was working on — how to produce a flat, inexpensive material that could selectively block light waves vibrating in certain orientations — had defeated some of the leading optical scientists of the previous century. Land solved it in his early twenties, using a method of suspending tiny crystals of quinine sulfate in a plastic film. The patent he filed on the technology in 1929, when he was twenty, became the foundation of his entire subsequent career.

He returned to Harvard briefly in 1932 to use the laboratory facilities, but never completed his undergraduate degree. He held no doctorate. Over the following six decades, he accumulated 535 US patents — second only to Thomas Edison's 1,097 in American history. The patents covered, among other things, polarised sunglasses (which made Polaroid initially profitable in the 1930s and 1940s), polarised filters for camera lenses, the entire instant-photography process, the early development of three-dimensional film projection, the retinex theory of human colour vision, and a long list of optical and chemical innovations that would have, individually, been the central achievement of most scientific careers.

Land was, by the accounts of those who worked with him, a singular kind of inventor. He was not a tinkerer in the Edison mode of trying many things until one worked. He was a theorist who would sit with a problem for weeks or months, working out the underlying physics in his head, and would only begin building once he had convinced himself the design was conceptually correct. He worked, for most of his adult life, in marathon sessions of twenty to forty hours, sustained by tea and chocolate, with his sleeves rolled up and his shoes off, in a converted lab at Polaroid's Cambridge campus.

The corporate culture he built at Polaroid reflected this temperament. The company's research budget was, throughout Land's leadership, larger than its marketing budget. Engineers were promoted on the basis of their patent output. The company's most famous corporate slogan, attributed to Land himself, was: "Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible." Another, equally famous, was: "The bottom line is in heaven."

What Steve Jobs took from him

Steve Jobs's admiration for Land has been documented in essentially every Jobs biography. Walter Isaacson's authorised biography quotes Jobs describing Land as "a national treasure." The two men met at least once, in the early 1980s, by which point Land had been pushed out of Polaroid and Jobs was running Apple. The meeting was, by Jobs's later account, transformative.

The specific aspects of Land's approach Jobs took into Apple's culture are visible in essentially every major decision Apple made through the late 1990s and 2000s. Land's emphasis on integrated hardware-and-software design — at Polaroid, the camera and the film chemistry had to be designed together, by the same team, because they functioned as a single product — is the architectural principle that distinguishes Apple from every other consumer-electronics company. The famous quote that Jobs repeated for decades, people don't know what they want until you show it to them, is essentially a paraphrase of Land's longstanding position that products do not need to be researched into existence; they need to be discovered and demonstrated. The MIT-style scientific demonstration, where the inventor reveals a working prototype to a live audience, was Land's preferred method of unveiling new Polaroid products. Jobs adopted the format almost completely for his own product launches.

Jobs visited Land at the Polaroid offices in 1983, at a moment when Land had just been forced out of the company. The meeting took place in the conference room Land had used for decades. Jobs's recollection, recounted to several biographers, was that he found Land in deep grief — not for the loss of his title, but for the company's strategic direction since his departure. The company, in Land's view, had stopped doing the kind of inventing that made it worth running.

The Polavision project that ended his career

The proximate cause of Land's removal from Polaroid was a project called Polavision. Polavision was an instant-movie system — a camera, film, and viewing device that allowed a home user to record a short movie and play it back almost immediately, without sending the film to a laboratory. Land had been working on the underlying technology for over a decade. He believed Polavision would be the next great consumer-electronics franchise, equivalent in market potential to the original instant camera.

Polavision launched in 1977. It was, by every reasonable measure, a commercial disaster. The product was expensive (about seven hundred dollars in 1977 dollars). The image quality was poor compared to the home video equipment that was beginning to appear from Sony and other Japanese manufacturers. The film was costly and limited to short clips. The mass-market consumer demand Land had projected did not materialise. Polaroid took a sixty-eight million dollar write-down on Polavision inventory and tooling in 1979.

The board of Polaroid, by 1980, had concluded that Land's product judgment was no longer reliable. The decision to push him out was made over the following two years. Land resigned as Chairman in July 1982, at the age of seventy-three, after nearly fifty years running the company he had founded. He sold all of his Polaroid stock and used the proceeds to fund the Rowland Institute for Science, a private research foundation in Cambridge where he continued to work on his colour-vision theories until his death in 1991.

The Polavision failure, in retrospect, was at least partly a problem of timing rather than judgment. The Sony Betamax and JVC VHS systems, which would dominate home video for the next two decades, had only just appeared. Land's competing instant-film system would have struggled against any successful video format, no matter how well it had been executed. But the failure was real and the financial cost was substantial, and the board's response — to remove the founder and bring in professional management — was, by the conventional standards of corporate governance, defensible.

What happened after Land left

The two decades following Land's departure are the part of the Polaroid story that is least often told. The company's professional management did exactly what they had been brought in to do: they cut the research budget, focused on near-term profitability, and deferred long-term technology investments. The instant-camera franchise continued to throw off cash through the 1980s and into the 1990s. The company's revenues actually grew in the years immediately after Land's departure.

What the new management did not do was prepare Polaroid for digital photography. Polaroid had developed fully functional digital cameras as early as 1996 — the underlying technology was within the company's competence. But the leadership chose, repeatedly, to prioritise the existing instant-film business. Digital cameras would, like Kodak's, cannibalise the high-margin film franchise. The leadership was not willing to do the cannibalisation while the existing business was profitable.

By the late 1990s, the digital transition was unmistakeable. Sony, Olympus, Canon, and Nikon were releasing digital cameras at price points the consumer market would accept. Polaroid's instant-film sales began to decline. The company's debt, which had been taken on through the 1990s to fund acquisitions and shareholder distributions, became increasingly difficult to service.

On October 11, 2001, Polaroid Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The reorganisation sold most of the company's assets, including the Polaroid name, to Bank One's One Equity Partners, which renamed the entity Polaroid Holding Company.

The second bankruptcy, and the Ponzi scheme

The story might have ended there. It did not. In April 2005, Polaroid Holding Company was acquired by Petters Group Worldwide, a Minnesota private-equity firm founded by an entrepreneur named Tom Petters. Petters had built a reputation through the early 2000s as an aggressive consumer-electronics investor. He had acquired and revived several brands. He told the press, after the Polaroid acquisition, that he intended to revitalise the brand and expand its product line.

Petters Group Worldwide was, in fact, a Ponzi scheme. The investments Petters had been making, and the companies he had been acquiring, were partly financed by funds raised from outside investors who had been told the money was being used to finance the purchase of consumer electronics for resale to Costco and Sam's Club. The purchase orders, the resale invoices, and most of the underlying transactions were fabricated. The total scale of the fraud, when it was eventually unwound, was approximately 3.65 billion dollars.

In October 2008, Petters was arrested by the FBI. He was subsequently convicted on twenty counts of fraud and money laundering and sentenced to fifty years in federal prison. The criminal investigation forced Polaroid Corporation, then under Petters's control, into its second Chapter 11 filing on December 18, 2008. The instant-film business, which had been the original Polaroid franchise, was discontinued in 2008 as part of the bankruptcy proceedings. The Polaroid brand assets were sold at auction in April 2009 to Hilco Consumer Capital and Gordon Brothers Brands for 87.6 million dollars.

What the case actually demonstrates

The Polaroid story is sometimes told as a parable about innovation — a brilliant inventor whose company couldn't survive without him. This is true but understates what happened. The deeper structural lesson is about what a particular kind of company is actually built on, and what it loses when that thing is taken away.

Polaroid under Edwin Land was a research organisation that happened to sell consumer products. The financial success of the products funded the research. The research produced the next generation of products. The cycle had been operating, with substantial profitability, for nearly fifty years when Land was removed. The board's view in 1980 was that the company would be more profitable if it stopped operating as a research organisation and started operating as a normal consumer-electronics company — managing the existing franchise, returning cash to shareholders, investing only in low-risk product extensions.

This view was not unreasonable. By any standard financial analysis, Polaroid in 1982 had a fully developed product line, an established global distribution network, and a brand with massive consumer recognition. The company appeared to be in a position to harvest decades of accumulated investment. What the board's analysis did not capture was that the research culture Land had built was the actual moat. The instant-camera franchise was not naturally durable. It was sustained, year after year, by the company's continuous incremental improvements to film chemistry, camera mechanics, and adjacent products. Stop the research, and the franchise would, slowly at first and then quickly, be overtaken by other companies whose research was continuing.

This is what happened. Polaroid did not lose to digital photography because the technology surprised it. The company had digital cameras working in its labs by 1996. It lost to digital photography because, by 1996, it no longer had the organisational capacity to commercialise major new product categories — that capacity had been Land, and the team Land had built, and the culture of treating research as the company's central activity. All of that had been quietly dismantled across the fifteen years following Land's departure.

Steve Jobs, watching this happen from across the country, drew the conclusion that almost certainly shaped Apple's later structural choices. A research-driven product company, in Jobs's reading, cannot survive without a leader whose entire identity is wrapped up in the inventing. The moment the company is run by professional managers optimising for current profitability, the engine that built the company will, slowly, stop running. The decline will not be visible at first. The franchise will appear to be holding up. By the time the decline becomes obvious, the rebuild will not be possible.

This is, almost word for word, the principle Jobs would later use to justify his own approach to running Apple — the obsessive focus on product detail, the refusal to delegate strategic product decisions to professional executives, the willingness to keep the company on a perpetual schedule of major new launches even when the existing products were comfortably profitable. He had, by then, watched Edwin Land's company be destroyed by the alternative.