Business
The Story of Polaroid: Edwin Land and the Instant Photo
A child's question in Santa Fe in 1943 became the SX-70, the Giant Polaroid and one of America's most admired brands. Then came Kodak, the phone and a factory set for demolition.
In 1943, Edwin Land was on vacation with his family in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when he took a photograph of his young daughter, Jennifer. She asked him why she couldn't see it. Any adult at the time could have given her the ordinary answer: the film had to be sent off and developed, and the picture would turn up days later. Land kept turning the question over instead. “Within an hour, the camera, the film, and the physical chemistry became so clear to me,” he later recounted.
