Aladdin Emerges

• Author: Ronald K. Fierstein
• Profession: Lawyer on the team of litigators from the prestigious patent law firm of Fish & Neave
• Pages: 147-170

147

CHAPTER 8

ALADDIN EMERGES

America was a troubled and distracted country in early 1971. Richard

Nixon was starting the third year of his first term as president and contin-

ued to pursue the war in Vietnam vigorously. Protests grew against Nixon

and his increasingly unpopular policies, from students on college cam-

puses who had endured the Kent State Massacre the previous year, to the

mainstream media in which Archie Bunker began his TV reign as a per-

sonification of the average guy enduring the “pinko” rants of his “dumb

Polack” son-in-law, to the national political arena where Senator George

McGovern of South Dakota announced his candidacy for president on an

anti-war platform. The tide would not turn against the Vietnam “conflict,”

as it was called, until June 30, when the New York Times published the

first of the Pentagon Papers. But Vietnam was the event that, during this

period, dominated the attention of the nation, its people, and its media. It

was in this environment that Edwin Land continued to work toward real-

izing his almost thirty-year quest to provide the world with the ultimate

instant photography system. And in early 1971, it appeared that the goal

was indeed finally within reach.

Polaroid, led by the charismatic and enigmatic Land, had become the

Apple Computer of the mid-twentieth century. It was arguably the most

admired and glamorous technology company in the world. A loyal fan

base of consumers and investors eagerly anticipated its new products.

Six years earlier, Land had made the daring gamble of committing more

than half a billion dollars of Polaroid laboratory research funds to the pur-

suit of his ultimate instant photography system. He did so without hav-

ing done a single dollar’s worth of market research to determine whether

people would actually buy the product. This leap of faith would later be

characterized as “the biggest gamble ever made on a consumer product.”1

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A Triumph of Genius

148

Articulating a philosophy that would later become the mantra of Apple’s

Steve Jobs, Land proclaimed, “We don’t do market surveys. We create the

markets with our products.”2

At this point, work had not yet been concluded on several remaining

technical issues for Polaroid’s new system. For example, a “light-piping”

problem that occurred during the film unit’s exit from the camera still

persisted.3 That is, unwanted light would “pipe” through the top transpar-

ent support of the film unit as it emerged from the camera exit, and move

back through the plastic support into the camera behind the spread rollers

where it would reach the yet unprotected photosensitive layers of the film.

This light was reaching the film unit before the chemical opacification

system incorporated into the processing solution could completely take

effect, causing unwanted extra exposure that ruined the picture. It all hap-

pened in a fraction of a second, but it was a potentially disastrous defect.

This was a problem first identified by Land and Rogers two years earlier,

but it had not yet been eliminated by any of the design changes that had

been made to the camera prototype as it evolved from model to model.

More importantly, Polaroid’s new facilities for manufacturing the

camera and film were still taking shape, with no guarantee of an actual

completion date.4 Manufacturing the film was a particularly daunting

prospect, with no guarantee of success. Although Polaroid had years of

experience making the positive components of its film, it had never made

photographic negative, the more challenging part of the operation. And

now, Kodak refused to manufacture the negative for the new system. As

Fortune pointed out, “only a handful of companies in the world have been

commercially successful at making even conventional color film. No less

a company than DuPont tried and gave up.”5 Kodak had its doubts about

Polaroid’s prospects as well. “As one in the business,” Louis Eilers had

told Business Week, “it seems a prodigious task to me. They can hardly

afford to hire all PhD’s to run their machines. I would predict quite a few

headaches in startup of their production.”6

Kodak had never allowed Polaroid’s scientists to see its negative-

coating facility and had steadfastly kept its negative coating technology

secret. While progress had been made in Polaroid’s pilot plant in Waltham,

Massachusetts, it was still a huge leap of faith to assume that the effort

could be scaled up sufficiently to supply the entire negative requirement

for the commercial release of Polaroid’s new system. For that purpose,

Polaroid had committed $60 million to build a new “fantastically compli-

cated” plant in New Bedford, Massachusetts, but that facility was not yet

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