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The most daring concept in the new camera involves the film. Determined not to waste the SX-70 photographer's time by making him wait for pictures to develop inside the camera, Land ordered his chemists to find a way to let the pictures develop outside. His suggestion: find an "opacifier" (from the word opaque) that would cloud the film and block out light rays, while special developing chemicals did their work. A team of 25 chemists worked for four years to produce such an agent. When they brought the first bottle of it to Land's office, he gave them a cake inscribed: "From darkness there shall come light." The film's treated negative, only one three-hundredth of an inch thick, contains no fewer than eight chemical layers, some of them the thickness of a red light wave (about .00002 in.).
If Edwin Land had his way, the sum total of public knowledge about his life would not be much thicker. Extremely wary of publicity, he has held only three press conferences in his career and refuses to speak about himself to all but a few close friends. The son of a merchant, Land was raised near Norwich, Conn., and in 1926 graduated from Norwich Academy with near-perfect marks. His high school physics teacher, Raymond Case, recalls that in his senior year Land "was already working at a level where I couldn't help him." He was also a prize-winning debater and a member of the Norwich track team.
The Polaroid empire was founded on the results of experiments performed by Land as an 18-year-old Harvard student in 1928. He was experimenting with ways to polarize light, a process in which rays in a beam of light are screened out unless they are traveling on a single, straight plane. Among other things, polarized light produces far less glare than diffused light. Scientists have long known that certain calcite crystals can do the job of filtering; Land's accomplishment was in polarizing light with other materials, including polyvinyl alcohol sheets and various forms of iodine. He became so engrossed in his discoveries that he dropped out of school to pursue them and never returned to graduate. Though he is called Dr. Land by almost everyone, his doctoral degrees are all honorary, including one from Harvard.
He continued his research in the New York Public Library, in a rented room on Manhattan's West 55th Street, and in a Columbia University physics lab, which he occasionally got into by climbing through an unlocked window after closing hours. His lab assistant in the early years was his wife, the former Helen ("Terre") Maislen, who subsequently retired to raise the Lands' two daughters, Jennifer and Valerie, both now married. Land has always been extremely close to his family. He and Mrs. Land live quietly in a rambling New England house on Cambridge's Brattle Street, two miles from his office.