Volume 35, Number 6 · April 14, 1988
I Am a Camera
By Jeremy Bernstein
Land's Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It
by Peter C. Wensberg
Houghton Mifflin, 258 pp., $18.95
This country has, at least until recently, been known for the sort of inventions that change the way people live. Edison's invention of a usable electric light bulb is one obvious example, and the invention of the transistor in 1948 by the three Bell Labs physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley is another. To this list one could add the invention of Polaroid, the light absorbing material used in sunglasses and wherever else it is desirable to reduce glare, and the invention in 1943 of the idea of 'instant' or 'one-step' photography. Both of these were the creations of the American-born scientist-inventor Edwin H. Land, now seventy-eight years old. While Land's Polaroid Corporation is well known to the general public, Land himself has been almost a complete enigma. He has never allowed anyone to interview him at length, never written an autobiography, and never participated in the writing of his biography by anyone else.
Review, 4495 words
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