A Consumer Curiosity?

• Author: Ronald K. Fierstein
• Profession: Lawyer on the team of litigators from the prestigious patent law firm of Fish & Neave
• Pages: 57-78

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CHAPTER 4

A CONSUMER CURIOSITY?

By 1947, Land had moved into his own laboratory and office separate

from the rest of Polaroid’s operations and located in a building just across

the street from Polaroid’s facility at 730 Main Street in Cambridge. It was

an old brick two-story factory building at 2 Osborn Street, sandwiched

between Harvard and MIT, and had an important place in the history of

technology. There, Thomas Watson had received the very first two-way

long distance telephone call from Alexander Graham Bell in 1876.

In the wake of the publicity generated by the New York City demon-

stration, anticipation for the public release of Polaroid’s one-step system

was high. Unfortunately, Land and his colleagues were not even close

to being ready. The technology was close but not the final designs of a

mass-producible version of the camera or the film. Getting there would

take almost two years. (See Fig. 4-1.)

During this period, business for Polaroid continued to decline. The

profitable military sales from the war years had dried up, as expected. For-

tunately, a special tax provision provided the company with funds sufficient

to carry on. During the war, the government had instituted an emergency

tax on what were characterized as “excess profits” made during the war.

Congress had first passed this kind of provision in March 1917 to limit

excess profits made in World War I, as well as to raise revenue to fight the

war. President Franklin Roosevelt brought it back in 1942 for World War II.

However, once the war was over, in order to support the transition to nor-

mal economic activity, the tax code was amended and the taxes paid rebated

to companies like Polaroid.1

Land’s plan for his commercial one-step product was to secure sup-

plies of the negative component from an outside source; his company

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A Triumph of Genius

58

would then manufacture the positive (or image-receiving sheet) and

assemble it with the negative into the composite film for sale to the pub-

lic. The positive was really the unique structure in the process, and that

is where all of Polaroid’s research efforts had been directed. All of the

imaging experiments done by Muller, Land, and others had used a stan-

dard Kodak black-and-white photographic silver halide emulsion. So now

Polaroid turned to Kodak to provide a negative containing the same stan-

dard emulsion for its commercial film, but this time coated on a paper

base. Land had anticipated this arrangement when he made his 1946 pre-

sentation to Kodak’s Kenneth Mees. Sure enough, Kodak agreed to sell

negative to Polaroid for a fixed price.2 In this, Land’s second deal with

Kodak, the vendor-customer relationship was reversed; instead of supply-

ing Kodak, Polaroid became Kodak’s customer, and by the late 1960s,

it ranked as one of Kodak’s top-three corporate accounts, alongside R.J.

Reynolds and Phillip Morris, cigarette manufacturers for whom Kodak

provided cellulose acetate filter tips.3

As a result of this new relationship, and to enable it to do the best

job, Kodak was interested in learning more about the process that Pola-

roid was working on. A special arrangement was made whereby some

Kodak scientists, led by Henry Yutzy, would come to Cambridge so Pola-

roid could show them what it was doing. In terms of intellectual prop-

erty, the agreement provided that any inventions made by Kodak in the

photographic diffusion transfer field as a result of the work it was doing

for Polaroid would belong to Polaroid. However, Kodak would have the

option of using any of Polaroid’s technology in the document-copying

field.4 It was the start of a unique, “cordial,” and cooperative relationship

between the companies that would last for more than two decades.5 While

Kodak’s management had no interest in getting directly into the field of

one-step photography that Polaroid was pioneering, they were very sup-

portive, mentoring Land and his colleagues.6

As development work at Polaroid on the positive part of the film

sandwich continued, Polaroid decided that the images in the first con-

sumer version of the film were going to be sepia toned, as had been the

case in all of the early public demonstrations of the process. The sepia

color of the image was due to the chemistry of the process. Development

produced a brown-silver colloid that diffused to form the image, rather

than a pure black compound that could produce a black-and-white image.

In the early stages of the research, this chemistry had proven easier to

adapt to the diffusion transfer process. Much more additional work would

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