CORPORATIONS: 60-Second Film

For his “picture-in-a-minute” Polaroid camera, Inventor Edwin H. Land last week demonstrated a new invention: a film that delivers black-and-white transparencies (instead of standard prints) within 60 seconds after they are snapped. The transparencies, says Land, have probably ten times the light range of conventional prints, clearly reproducing the smallest details when projected onto a screen. Another advantage: the film is five times as fast as Eastman’s high-speed TriX, can be used successfully under the worst lighting conditions.

When the new film is put on sale in a month, Land expects it to be the most popular new photographic product since his original 60-second camera (TIME, March 3, 1947). Although the camera (at $89.75) was at first pooh-poohed by many dealers as just a costly plaything, it soon made Polaroid one of the biggest U.S. makers of cameras, with an output of more than 500,000 cameras last year.

Harvard to Hollywood. Edwin (“Din”) Land, now a handsome, boyish-looking 46, was a physics student at Harvard when he quit to form his own company in 1932 to market his first major invention, a plastic that filters the glare out of light rays. During World War II, Polaroid Corp. did a $16 million-a-year business making glare-proof gunsights and sunglasses and other products for the armed forces. But by 1948 gross sales were down to $1,481,372 (net loss: $865,256). Land’s camera snapped Polaroid into the black again (1949 profit: $720,795) and kept it there.

The company’s quickest killing came during Hollywood’s 3-D bonanza in 1953. As the only U.S. maker of the glasses needed to see movies in depth, it was soon making 12 million pairs a month, grossed over $26 million that year. In 1954, when 3-D dwindled and died, Polaroid was doing so well with other products that profits stayed up over the million-dollar mark. In 1955 Polaroid will probably net close to $2,000,000.

Man with Two Hats. As Polaroid’s president, Land is able to push promising research projects even when the payoff seems far off, e.g., color film for the 60-second camera, which is “coming along nicely” after years in the laboratory. He has a formal, functional president’s office in Polaroid’s Cambridge headquarters. But he spends most of his time in a dingy laboratory office cluttered with cameras, chemicals and corncob pipes.

Land likes to talk about his ideas so much that associates worry that his brain waves will get out from under his hat. He sometimes calls associates to the laboratory in the middle of the night or on holidays. Once he telephoned Executive Vice President J. Harold Booth to complain that none of his research staff had appeared for work, learned that it was Thanksgiving Day.

60 Million Windshields. Din Land firmly believes that creative invention is a “one-man operation,” until he is convinced a new product is nearly ready to market. Then his team moves in. One of biggest potential developments: a sys tem of polarized auto windshields and leadlight lenses that, in combination, take the glare out of night driving. One big obstacle: since the super-brilliant lights used in the Polaroid system would require new headlight and windshield glass for all the 60 million-odd cars on U.S.

roads, it would mean changes in state driving laws, even if Detroit industry were prepared to build the glass into new cars tomorrow.