Edwin Land
Edwin Land
Edwin Herbert Land, ForMemRS, FRPS, Hon.MRIwas an American scientist and inventor, best known as the co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation. Among other things, he invented inexpensive filters for polarizing light, a practical system of in-camera instant photography, and his retinex theory of color vision. His Polaroid instant camera, which went on sale in late 1948, made it possible for a picture to be taken and developed in 60 seconds or less...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth7 May 1909
CityBridgeport, CT
CountryUnited States of America
The present is the past biting into the future.
Photography is unlike any other art form. In the other arts there is always a continuous interplay between the artist and his art. He has the painting or sculpture before him. What we have tried to do is to provide a medium for "artistic expression" to anyone with only a reasonable amount of time. By giving him a camera system with which he need only control his selection of focus, composition and lighting, we free him to select the moment and to criticize immediately what he has done. We enable him to see what else he wants to do on the basis of what he has just learned.
Don't do anything that someone else can do.
It only takes a day to change someone from an anti-intellectual to an intellectual by persuading him that he might be one!
The role of science is to be systematic, to be accurate, to be orderly, but it certainly is not to imply that the aggregated, successful hypotheses of the past have the kind of truth that goes into a number system.
In a few wretched buildings, we created a whole new industry with international significance.
If you sense a deep human need, then you go back to all the basic science. If there is some missing, then you try to do more basic science and applied science until you get it. So you make the system to fulfill that need, rather than starting the other way around, where you have something and wonder what to do with it.
Any problem can be solved as long as it is stated properly.
The future may require not so much having a new idea as stopping having an old idea.
A mistake is a future benefit, the full value of which is yet to be realized.
Famous in our circles is the story of the visiting English banker who in 1948 upon seeing our model 95 camera commented, 'Very interesting, but why would one want a picture in a minute?'
I don't mind conducting the orchestra if I can play the violin.
Fifty years after we undertook to make the first synthetic polarizers we find them the essential layer in digital liquid-crystal. And thirty four years after we undertook to make the first instant camera and film, our kind of photography has become ubiquitous.
We can be dramatic, even theatrical; we can be persuasive; but the message we are telling must be true.