The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way (20 page)

Meanwhile, in the laboratory, Land and his associates had developed a new and ingenuous 3-D system – called Vectography – in which the two images of a stereo picture are printed in perfect register one on top of the other on a single frame. As in the conventional 3-D system, Polaroid glasses [were] needed to see the two images properly.

When Hollywood desperately jumped into 3-D movies in 1953, it adopted the old stereo system requiring two projectors, which were almost impossible to keep in register. As a result, customers usually saw a wretched picture and the 3-D boom collapsed in little more than a year. In that brief period, however, Polaroid sold almost 100 million viewing glasses for some six million dollars.

What originally enticed the New York bankers into financing Polaroid, and the company’s primary goal from 1937 to 1947, was the dream of putting its polarizing filters on every automobile headlight and every windshield in America. When two cars suitably equipped approached each other at night, neither driver would be blinded by the other’s headlights; yet for each the road ahead would be clearly illuminated by his own lights. Obviously, this would greatly reduce the hazard of night driving. While Land had failed to win a patent on this concept, Polaroid bought up the patent rights in 1938 from the man who had been adjudged the inventor but who had no practical polarizing filter to do the job.

There had not been enough time before World War Two for Polaroid to persuade Detroit to put Polaroid filters on all its new cars. Then, during the war, the idea had to be dropped while Polaroid turned out military optics. In 1945 Polaroid’s sales reached nearly $17 million. A year later they had toppled below five million, and Polaroid was counting heavily on Detroit’s adoption of headlight and windshield polarizers. Finally, in 1947, extensive tests of the Polaroid system were conducted at the General Motors proving ground. The system passed all the engineering requirements.

Nevertheless, Detroit turned Polaroid down. Chief reason: The industry said it saw no practical way to provide the new system for 33 million motor vehicles then on the highways, and it believed that drivers of these vehicles would be handicapped by the somewhat brighter headlights that would have to be used on filter-equipped cars.

This was a serious blow to Land, especially since General Electric had shown that the added brightness did not increase the already existing hazard. It should have been obvious in any case that very few of the 33 million vehicles on the road in 1947 (most of them built before the war) would be in use for very long.

Detroit has been content to let the matter drop – but not Land. He has continued research on the project, and there is no doubt that he will seek another hearing in Detroit when he feels he is ready to beat down all possible opposition.

During 1947 Polaroid’s sales were $1,500,000, its operating loss two million dollars. Fortunately, a tax credit, based on the loss-carryback provision, cut the net loss to just under a million dollars.

Nineteen forty-seven would have been dismal indeed except that in February Land had disclosed his 60-second photographic process. Land could thank his daughter for the inspiration to invent the process. One day during World War Two, when he was taking pictures of her, she asked impatiently how soon she could see them. As Land explained that it took time to get them developed, he suddenly realized that there was something basically wrong with photography. Why should anyone have to wait hours or even days, to see a picture?

During 1944, when he could steal time from a crowded schedule, Land began experimenting with ways to get a finished picture directly out of the camera that took it. If he had troubled to ask experts what they thought of his objective, they would have been happy to tell him to stop wasting his time.

What, exactly, was the problem that Land faced? It would have been a neat trick just to develop an exposed negative inside a camera, within a minute or two, when the temperature might range from freezing to 110 degrees, with a reagent that could be incorporated in the roll of film and could be handled cleanly as an essentially dry material. But this would have had scant commercial value. Land had to find a way to do all this and simultaneously to provide chemicals that would pick out the unexposed silver grains in the negative, transport them through the active reagent and deposit them unscathed on a facing sheet of paper. On reaching this paper, the inert and invisible silver had to be released from chemical bondage and converted into metallic silver, thereby producing an exact positive counterpart of the negative image. Finally, when lifted out of the camera, the positive print had to be essentially dry and long-lasting – and it had to compete in quality with conventional photographs on which scientists the world over had spent more than 100 years of research.

In view of all this, the statement made by one of Land’s close associates does not seem farfetched. “I would be willing to bet,” he says, “that a hundred Ph.D.’s would not have been able to duplicate Land’s feat in ten years of uninterrupted work.”

Land moved ahead with unbelievable speed. Within six months he had essentially worked out all the basic physical elements of the commercial process.

Land himself can provide no explanation for the inventive process as he has experienced it. He believes that the ability to create may be the fundamental distinction between the human animal and all others. “Can you imagine,” he asks “an ape inventing an arrowhead?” He is impatient with the widespread notion that modern man has found, in science, some brand-new tool that “makes” discoveries and inventions. Instead, he believes the ability to discover and invent is something extremely ancient in man and something we know nothing about.

“I find it very important,” says Land, “to work intensively for long hours when I am beginning to see solutions to a problem. At such times atavistic competences seem to come welling up. You are handling so many variables at a barely conscious level that you can’t afford to be interrupted. If you are, it may take a year to cover the same ground you could cover otherwise in sixty hours.”

Up until 1946 – after years of part-time work on the camera and film – Land had never had more than a handful of assistants. Because of the war, these were young girls, bright, untrained in science and almost all of them, as it happened, graduates of Smith. Since 1948 his closest associate in developing and improving the 60-second process has been a Smith arts major named Meroë Morse. A daughter of Marston Morse, professor of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Miss Morse [later became] head of black-and-white film research at Polaroid. Land credits her with many important contributions, especially those leading to Polaroid’s present impressive line of films.

The chemistry and technology of preparing the positive sheet, which yields the finished Polaroid picture, is a tightly held commercial secret. In the well-guarded building where the positive sheet is coated and where the film developer is mixed, all drums and bottles of chemicals carry only coded labels. (The negative material, which differs from conventional negative chiefly in having a paper base, is made for Polaroid by Kodak and du Pont.)

With the 60-second camera and its original sepia film substantially worked out in 1947, Land moved to get them to the market as quickly as possible. The job of designing the camera and the special machinery needed to make the camera’s film was directed by William J. McCune, now vice-president for engineering. McCune and a few indefatigable associates – including a gifted mechanical engineer, Otto Wolff – contributed a whole new series of inventions to support Land’s fundamental work. One example: A study of shutters revealed that the time of even the best on the market was accurate only to ± 25%; McCune’s group invented a new shutter that is accurate to ±10%.

Since Polaroid, back in 1947, did not have $350,000 to spend on tools for the camera, it searched for a subcontractor who would bear the cost in return for a contract to build the camera. A small Rochester firm, now defunct, needed work desperately enough to take the gamble, in return for an order of 10,000 cameras. This was the beginning of Polaroid’s policy of not making anything it can buy outside at an acceptable price. . .

While confident of ultimate success, Polaroid was coldly objective about the problem of introducing a wholly new and untried camera costing $80 to $90. Land and his associates held long sessions with marketing experts at Harvard Business School and elsewhere and at one point gave serious thought to developing a nationwide door-to-door sales organization.

Ultimately it was clear that the normal retail outlets would have to be used. So as to make the best possible impression on photographic dealers, Polaroid set out to hire someone who had an outstanding reputation in the industry. The man Polaroid found was J. Harold Booth, a vice-president of Bell and Howell who had had 20 years of broad experience in engineering, manufacturing and sales.

Booth was enthusiastic about the Land camera from the moment he saw it. When he joined Polaroid in 1948 as executive vice-president and general manager, he brought to the firm not only his reputation but a great gift for promotion. His job was to sell the camera without any sales organization whatever and with an advertising budget so small that it seemed scarcely adequate to launch the camera in the Boston area alone.

Booth and his sales manager, Robert C. Casselman, conceived the plan of offering one department store in each major city an exclusive on the new camera for 30 days, provided the store would advertise prominently in newspapers – with only modest help from Polaroid – and would give the camera an intense promotional play throughout the store.

The Land camera went on sale for the first time on November 26, 1948, at Jordan Marsh, the big Boston department store. Demand was so great that frantic salesmen inadvertently sold display models from which parts were missing.

Polaroid paused to build up its depleted inventory. Then, in January 1949, Booth opened a dazzling promotion in Miami. He figured that cameras sold to well-heeled Miami vacationers would soon be scattered all over America, with every owner a Polaroid salesman. As part of his promotion, Booth supplied a squad of pretty girls and a batch of lifeguards with Land cameras to snap pictures at pools and beaches and give them away to gape-mouthed tourists. Within a few weeks most Miami stores had sold out their stock of Land cameras.

So the promotion moved from city to city. And while the great majority of dealers received the camera coldly, Polaroid’s 1949 sales soared to $6,680,000, of which over five million came from the new camera and film.

The first and only real crisis in 60-second photography arose in 1950, when Polaroid shifted from its original sepia picture to one that was black and white. In laboratory tests the new pictures seemed at least as lasting as the sepia, but six months after the new film reached dealers it was obvious that serious color fading took place under certain conditions.

Land concluded that the silver image was being attacked from both top and bottom by humidity and atmospheric contaminants. He set up two teams to tackle the problem. He and Meroë Morse headed one team to rebuild the positive sheet from the base up. A second team, headed by Elkan R. Blout, general manager of research . . . began looking for a plastic – to be used as a print coating – that would be practically odourless, would dry quickly into an insoluble, flexible, transparent coating and would not yellow with age. More than 200 new polymers were synthesized before the requirements were met. The plastic and new film were merged, and today Polaroid asserts that its prints will last fully as well as conventional prints. (Such teamwork between what Land calls the “photographic scientists” and the “chemical scientists” is an old story at Polaroid. In the current color-film program the chemists are dreaming up and synthesizing scores of new molecules, which the photographic team under Howard Rogers incorporates in experimental color film.)

Many dealers who had predicted a short commercial life for the Land camera thought their judgment confirmed during the print-fading period. And, indeed, in 1954 and 1955 there was a definite decline in Polaroid’s growth rate. But [after] 1955 Polaroid . . . had three booming years with sales growth of 31, 41 and 36%. Much of the credit for this upturn must go to Robert Casselman, promoted to sales vice-president in 1956.

Polaroid’s meteoric growth since 1955 can also be credited, in part, to new films whose speed (equivalent to ASA 200 and 400) compared favorably with the fastest conventional films then on the market. This year, or early next, Polaroid expects to introduce films roughly ten times faster (ASA 3000). Simultaneously it will offer a new “electric eye” shutter that can be clamped on the front of its present cameras and will automatically provide correct exposures for all outdoor lighting conditions. . .

Land keeps challenging his design staff to come up with a camera so light and compact that no one will want to be without one. He foresees the day when 100 million Americans will carry Land cameras as regularly as they now carry wallets and wristwatches. He believes that when 60-second cameras are this handy, every owner will snap the shutter at least once a day – in his business, on trips or at home. This exuberant vision implies film sales 200 times Polaroid’s present rate.

The vest-pocket Land camera is not yet in sight, but Polaroid is working on new models that will take pictures comparable in size to those made by its present large cameras but will be significantly smaller and more convenient to use. The present large models weigh about four and a half pounds and are relatively bulky. [Models weighing less than a pound were introduced in the 1960s but there is still no pocket Polaroid.]

Land has no doubt that Polaroid is going to get at least five to ten times as big as it is today. But what he passionately wants is for Polaroid to be known as the first manufacturer in the world that recognized the human dignity of every employee all day long. . . [One day in 1958] Land called his top associates and supervisors together. He said, “I think we are going to be magnificently successful and in a very short time . . . [but] if after we succeed in
just
doing that, we are just another large company, we will have contributed further to the hazard of the degradation of American culture. . .