Polaroid Spent $600 Million Because a Three-Year-Old Couldn't Wait

On a 1943 afternoon in Santa Fe, Edwin Land took a photograph of his three-year-old daughter Jennifer. She asked why she couldn't see it. Land was the head of an optics company, and the question apparently kept him walking. By the time he came back from his stroll, he had sketched the chemistry, the camera, and the film-pack architecture of instant photography. He demonstrated the concept to the Optical Society of America in February 1947. The Polaroid Land Camera Model 95 went on sale at a Boston department store before Christmas 1948 — all 57 units on the floor sold the first day.

That would have been the end of the story for a normal company. Land kept going.

The SX-70, his actual obsession, took the rest of his career. Polaroid spent roughly $600 million developing a folding single-lens reflex camera that ejected a sealed color print, motorized, with the chemistry developing in front of you on the open page. Land claimed the patent stack covered 20,000 technical advances. On April 25, 1972, at Polaroid's annual meeting, he stood up, pulled the closed camera from his jacket pocket, unfolded it, and took five pictures in ten seconds.

The price was the catch. The camera launched at $180 and the film at $6.90 for ten exposures — about $1,400 and $50 in current dollars. It still sold 700,000 units by mid-1974. Land wasn't trying to win on margin. He was trying to ship the camera his daughter had ordered in 1943.