As a diversion from this intense work, and to prepare for peacetime, he led the team that developed one-step, or instant, photography. The company expanded rapidly during World War II, drawing on its pioneering in polarizers to develop and manufacture devices that would cut battlefield glare, improve the accuracy of gun-aiming at night, and maintain the night vision of pilots and sailors. This enterprise evolved into the Polaroid Corporation in 1937. On 10 November 1929 Land married Helen (Terre) Maislen of Hartford, Connecticut the couple had two daughters.Īfter describing the sheet polarizer at a physics department seminar in 1932, Land again left Harvard, still without a degree, in order to go into the business of making and selling the polarizers he had invented. patents, the physics department gave him his own laboratory in which to perfect his invention. When Land returned to Harvard in 1929, after applying for the first of 535 U.S. Until that time polarizers of light, used for nearly a century for basic scientific research, were made of expensive crystals like calcite or tourmaline. This device was suitable for automobile headlights, visors, and windshields, to control nighttime glare and improve visibility. He attended Harvard for only a semester, then moved to New York City to begin experiments in optics.ĭuring more than two years in the city, studying intensely at the New York Public Library and experimenting in various Manhattan basements, Land succeeded in making a plastic sheet polarizer with billions of tiny crystals per square inch. Land graduated from Norwich Academy in 1926, having already pushed far beyond what his high school physics instructor could teach him. Wood of Johns Hopkins University (whom Land finally met in the 1930s). A major influence was the textbook Physical Optics, by Robert W. He first encountered light polarizers at the age of thirteen at a Connecticut summer camp named Mooween. Land was fascinated by science, particularly optics, from childhood. His older sister, Helen, pronounced his name “Din,” creating Land’s lifelong nickname. Young Edwin and his family settled in Norwich, Connecticut, after World War I. Land, a scrap-metal dealer and real-estate investor whose Jewish parents had fled persecution in tsarist Russia. Land was one of two children of Matha Goldfaden and Harry M. government adviser on spy planes and satellites from the 1950s onward. 1 March 1991 in Cambridge, Massachusetts), inventor of instant photography and the plastic sheet polarizer, founder of the Polaroid Corporation, scientific researcher on color vision, and confidential U.S.
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