Businessman-Scientist In Focus: EDWIN HERBERT LAND

• Share

FEW men have merged the worlds of business and science with greater success than Edwin Herbert Land, a scholarly New Englander who completely changed photography with his Polaroid Land Camera, which now turns out a finished picture in ten seconds — an invention that skeptics once derided as a passing plaything.

Trim and darkly handsome, "Din" Land, 51, has built his Polaroid Corp. into a company that employs 2,500, had 1960 sales of $99.4 million, and has given him and his family a paper fortune of more than $143 million. But Land has never let money, success or corporate detail interfere with his first love: the joy of discovery.

This week Polaroid announced another of the new develop ments that have made it Wall Street's darling (its stock went from 96¼ in January 1959 to 261 last year, is now 189) and one of the photography industry's fastest growing companies.

For conventional 4x5 cameras that use a special Polaroid attachment, the company has developed a film packet that produces both finished picture (see cut) and negative in 15 seconds. Next month Polaroid will announce a new film for its Land cameras, which will produce black and white slides in only ten seconds. Under development is a one-step color film that shows promise of being the company's next big success.

Over his fast-developing company Land presides like a physics professor engaged with his students in a great adventure. New products at Polaroid are never developed because of market research or questionnaires to customers. "Industry must have an insight," says Land, "into what are the deep needs of people that they don't know they have." Land did not conceive his camera purely as a hot commercial product, felt that a simple, one-step camera could be "a new medium of expression" for people with artistic leanings who do not draw, sculpt or paint.

DISCOVERIES, says Land, are made "by some individual who has freed himself from a way of thinking that is held by friends and associates who may be more intelligent, better educated, better disciplined, but who have not mastered the art of the fresh, clean look at the old, old knowledge." To challenge his employees to take a fresh look, Land gives them an individual freedom rare in industry. He offers them special courses in everything from chemistry to photography, often switches production workers to research or engineering projects to forestall boredom and encourage new interests. He encourages his scientists to pursue pure-research projects on their own at least part of the time. Land's aim is "the ideal company" in which "the working life is so deeply satisfying, so richly rewarding that leisure becomes relaxation rather than escape." Land himself spends much of his time in his laboratory in the company's Cambridge, Mass., headquarters. He devotes about half his time to research (he holds more than 200 U.S. patents), often works in the lab for days and nights on end when a project is at its vital stage. He is busy working on research into color vision, to which he has already made outstanding contributions, and he takes personal responsibility for the company's black-and-white film developments.