Founders - #133 Edwin Land (Polaroid and The Man Who Invented It)

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

What I learned from reading Land’s Polaroid: A Company and The Man Who Invented It by Peter C. Wensberg.----Come see a live show with me and Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like The Best on October 19th in New York City. Get your tickets here! ----Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can listen to Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes and every bonus episode. ---[1:14] He was revered to an extraordinary extent by most of the people who worked for him.  [1:36] Land did not earn a college degree, yet he has received more medals and scientific honors than most living Americans.  [3:36]  Land's life seemed to be primarily a life of the mind. His great dramas were largely self created, played on the stage of Polaroid, which he constructed for himself. [4:14] All of the people that you and I are studying on this podcast created their own world within the world.  [5:55] The end this book made me think of this quote by Steve Jobs: Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. [7:38] Peter [the author] worked with Edwin Land for 20 years. As a result this book —more than any other— has a lot of direct quotes from Land.  [7:50] “Nature doesn’t care.” By that he meant nothing in nature would help or hinder their progress to a solution except their own ingenuity. Nature offered no bar to the elegant solution over the awkward compromise if they had the imagination to seek it and the wit to discover it. Nature had no concern for the affairs of men. [9:42] At 37 years old he had achieved everything to which he aspired except success.  [10:55]  This product, this innovation, this creation— of one of the most important products ever made— came at a time when the company was almost out of business. [12:42] Land said running his company felt like he was a physics professor leading his students on a grand experiment.  [12:53] I really do believe that Edwin Land is one of the most important entrepreneurs that ever existed. The way his mind works is extremely unique.  [17:08] Land on his motivations in life: I find an urge to make a significant intellectual contribution that can be tangibly embodied in a product or process. [19:45] Edwin Land at 18: A secretive young man who was well-dressed but usually disheveled, often highly agitated, prone to long periods of intense activity, rarely volunteering any explanation of what he was trying to accomplish, eating haphazardly, his sleeves rolled up, his shock of dark hair falling in his face as he worked.  [20:31] Edwin Land on how to work: If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it and don't think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; it is amazing how quickly you get through those 5,000 steps.  [24:52] An example of Land’s obsessiveness: They start at 8:30 and they work until 4:30. Then everything shuts down and they all go home. They don't work on Saturdays or Sundays.They keep telling me I should work for them. How could I get anything done?  [29:15]At this point we are 14 years into the story: Nothing told land that he had built a business that could survive, let alone grow.[30:47] A Landian question took nothing for granted, accepted no common knowledge, tested the cliche, and treated conventional wisdom as an oxymoron.  [35:56] Why is Polaroid a nutty place? To start with, it’s run by a man who has more brains than anyone has a right to. He doesn’t believe anything until he’s discovered it and proved it for himself. Because of that, he never looks at things the way you and I do. He has no small talk. He has no preconceived notions. He starts from the beginning with everything. That’s why we have a camera that takes pictures and develops them right away.  [39:15] Land hated to stop working. Once begun on a course of action, he wanted to experiment until the hypothesis was proved. He worked liked a predator, stalking a solution, with perpetual patience and energy. His intuitive leaps had landed him on the neck of his prey too often for him not to believe that he could do it the next time and the time after that.  [50:50] Land ran his company longer than any of America's great business leaders, longer than Thomas Edison, longer than Henry Ford, longer than George Eastman. Giving it up had been the hardest thing he had done in his life.  —“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested, so my poor wallet suffers.”— GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book. It's good for you. It's good for Founders. A list of all the books featured on Founders Podcast. ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Polaroid as a company was for 45 years virtually synonymous with Edwin Land. He was its founder. He invented its first products, and indeed many of its products and processes, throughout the five decades of the company's history. His titles, during most of the period from 1937 to 1982, included Chairman of the Board, President, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Oper operating officer, and director of research. Although he cultivated a legend of privacy and inaccessibility to the press, he remained, far and away, the best-known member of the company, for many years the only one familiar to the public.

He stayed aloof from the company's advertising so long as his friends and intimates told him Polaroid's advertising was good. The moment he suspected it was verging on the mediocre, he descended from Olympus, clothed in a mantle of righteousness. Since for many years advertising was included among my marketing responsibilities at Polaroid, my relationship with land was alternatively very close and moderately distant. I always felt comfortable speaking my mind to him. Many of his employees did not. He was revered to an extraordinary extent by most of the people who worked for him. Most men of Land's stature, particularly those of whom great success has come in the business world,

earned their share of distractors. Land's were primarily outside the company, principally in the ranks of financial analysts and reporters. Land did not earn a college degree, yet he has received more medals and scientific honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science, than most living Americans. The full list of his honors runs to three pages. He holds 533 patents, second only to Thomas Edison's 1093, and he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. I joined Polaroid in 1958 with little knowledge of the company, but with a sense that I was embarking on an adventure. I began in advertising

and promotion. In 1980, I became executive vice president and was given responsibility for technical and industrial photography. In 1982, Land cut ties with his company and retired to devote full-time to his laboratory and foundation. Two months later, I left Polaroid as well. The subject of this book is Polaroid and Land. The span is 1926 to 1982, the period when the company and the man were inseparable, virtually indistinguishable. That was an excerpt from the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is Land's Polaroid,

A Company and the Man Who Invented It, and it was written by Peter Wensberg. This is now the fourth book that I've read about Edwin Land, and I think it has the most unique perspective out of any other book that I've read so far, because Peter worked directly with Edwin Land for over 20 years. So we get insights and perspectives that are not contained in the other book. If you want to learn more, I encourage you to listen to Founders number 40, which is about the books Insisting on the Impossible and Instant, The Story of Polaroid. And then last week, Founders number 132, which is on the book, The Instant Image, which is also a biography of Edwin Land. So I want to start right with something that Peter

wrote in the prologue. And let me read this to you, and then I'll tell you how I interpret this. He says, Land's life seemed to be primarily a life of the mind. His great dramas were largely self-created, played on the stage of Polaroid, which he constructed for himself. If those productions did not begin or end as the supporting cast would have them, it was a small matter to the principal player. His interest in our reactions was minimal, polite, sometimes kind, but limited by the great drain of energy necessary to sustain his own part. So when I first came across that paragraph, I thought it was a really a reinforcement of why reading biographies is so important. All of the people that you and I are studying on this podcast created their own world within the world. And another way to think about that is they were

the stars of their own movie. And in this case, he's using the metaphor of being the star in your own play. And then when I finished the book, I realized that's not a complete explanation of why this activity is so important. When I got to the end of the book and it sinks in, that the life story, not only is the book over, but the life story of Edwin Land is over. He's no longer with us. His ideas live on. His story lives on. The author is no longer with us. I looked up and read his obituary right after I finished reading the book, and it just exacerbated this bittersweet, melancholic feeling that I've talked about multiple times. You just realize that that path lies before all of us. So the copy I hold in my hand, it's a signed copy by the author. He signed it on February 15th, 1988. And I was flipping through my notes after reading

his obituary. And it hit me again. I was like, that person that wrote that no longer exists. And so I was sitting there trying to think of like why I could, I could sit here for 30 minutes listing, reading quotes of people that we've studied that are doing the same thing that you and I do, right? That are reading biographies. Some of the smartest, most productive people in the world find this activity so valuable that they take time away from their schedule to do it. And, and I think there's very practical things like you, you can download the learnings of someone's entire career in a few hours by reading the book. You can be inspired by stories of people not giving up, of persevering, of being determined. And then I thought of this quote, and it made me think of this quote from Steve Jobs that's in the biography by Walter Isaacson that I think illustrates the point that I'm poorly making here. And he says,

remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important remembering that you are going to die is the best way i know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose you are already naked there is no reason to follow your heart so let me just tie that back to this paragraph he's talking about that land's life primarily took place in his mind

that he created a world within his own world that he he was the star of his own movie. And I think that's probably the best way to live your life because we have nothing. What's the alternative? You have no alternative other than you wasted the one shot you have at life. And I think reading these life stories for me, especially for people that are already passed on, is a reinforcement that their fate is our fate. It's my fate. It's your fate. No one's going to get out of this alive. We might as well live the lives, just like Edwin Land, Steve Jobs, and others, that we want to live. We have nothing to lose. So I just want to put that up front.

It was a very impactful, emotional experience that I had. And it probably has something to do with that Peter spent his entire life in advertising. He's an extremely great writer. And you'll see that with some of the excerpts and passages I'm going to share with you today. All right, so let me move on to that. I just wanted to put that right up front because I think it's extremely, extremely important. I think this book, moving on, I think this book more than any other has a lot of direct quotes from Lance. We really get to have an insight into how his mind worked. I like this idea. So this is Land on Nature Doesn't Care. Nature doesn't care, he told his young laboratory assistants. By that, he meant that nothing in nature would help or hinder their progress to a solution except their own ingenuity, which admittedly was itself a condition of nature.

Nature offered no bar to the elegant solution over the awkward compromise if they had the imagination to seek it and the wit to discover it. Nature, serene or savage in their eyes, had no concern for the affairs of men. This book also has a lot more detail about the years of struggle that Polaroid had to go through that I personally find most interesting on all these stories. When Polaroid's, you know, on the Fortune 400, it's doing almost a billion dollars in sales. Land is one of the wealthiest people in the world. That part of the story is way less interesting than how he got there.

So this is a little bit about the state of land and Polaroid right before the release of their greatest product, which they struggled for about a decade and a half to come up with. So it says land was 37 years old. He had known since he was 17 that he would be a great figure of science and affairs. He had expected to be playing these roles long before now, but he had ultimately been frustrated each time the moment presented itself. He had staked the future of the company on an idea he called instant photography. The two years following the war, that's World War II, had brought the company close to disaster. Sales had fallen from $16 million to less than $2 million two years later.

Worst of all, he had been forced to fire people. Good people. From about 1,300 employees at the war's end, Polaroid has shrunk to fewer than 300. All that training, all those marvelous technical competences were being dissipated, scattered. And this to me, this following sentence is the best sentence of this entire section. At 37, he had achieved everything to which he aspired except success. So I wanted to bring that up because last week on Founders Number 132, I talked about the fact that he was 17 years old when he started doing experiments and dedicating his entire life to studying light.

That's when he went to the New York Public Library and read every single book contained there about light, optics, perception, all that. So 20 years later, he still has not achieved the success he thought he was going to achieve. Most people would have given up long before that. I think the difference between most people and the people that have biographies written about their lives is they don't quit. Land doesn't quit. He invents instant photography. This is about the product demonstration. This is him unveiling the first Land camera.

So this product demonstration results in one of history's most well-known photographs. In fact, if you Google image search Edwin Land, this is the famous picture that you'll see. It's the picture that's on the front of this book. It's a picture of him unveiling a picture of his own face. And it's almost the same size of his head. So it says, in an electric instant, Land had reinvented photography, his company and himself. Never was a birth so vividly recorded.

Now, keep in mind, this product, this innovation, this creation of one of the most important products ever made came at a time when the company was almost out of business. So it says, never was a birth so vividly recorded. The picture appeared in Life magazine. At the time, Life magazine was the most important magazine in America. I think it had a circulation of like five to six million people. Magazine one week later has a full page. One of the classic photographs of the decade. Reprinted in every photographic retrospective of the 40s and 50s.

It appeared the next morning on the front page of the New York Times. Now, what I found really interesting about the way he describes, the way he communicates, and this reminds me, there's a famous video of Steve Jobs when he came back from Apple. It's in 1997. I actually took notes. If you have access to my notebook, it's in there. And he talks about, I think Steve Jobs on marketing, something's in there and he talks about i think steve jobs on marketing something like that but he talks about uh apple's making like if you studied the the marketing that was taking place when when steve jobs left apple he's like apple's they're they're they're advertising their marketing is about speeds and feats it's like we don't talk about that we talk about what we believe in he talks about in human terms right and so the way land describes his

solution which is what his product he focuses not hey i made a camera it's like no what is the believe in. He talks about it in human terms, right? And so the way Land describes his solution, which is what his product, he focuses not, hey, I made a camera. It's like, no, what is the solution that my product gives you, right? He compares it in human terms, or excuse me, he describes in human terms. And then within just a sly sentence or two, he directly compares it to the main competitor, which is Kodak. Because Kodak at the time says, hey, you press one button, you take a picture, you press one button, we do the rest. What that means is you take the film out and then you mail it to us. And seven days later, we send you a picture back, right? So this is a really beautiful way to communicate. And Land was a, he didn't like communicating, but he was gifted at it. Communicating to the outside world, that is. He definitely liked communicating

within his company. He talked about, he thought about running his company like he was a physics professor and he was leading his students on a grand experiment. Again, I really do believe this is one of the most important and influential entrepreneurs that has ever existed. The way his mind works is extremely unique. I'm not expecting everybody to read five, six books on land, but I would pick up one of them, whichever one interests you the most. It is extremely unique. I'm not expecting everybody to, you know, to read five, six books on land, but I would pick up one of them, whichever one interests you the most. It

is very fascinating. So he says, this is a direct quote from land. This is one of the most significant pictures we have taken this evening. It illustrates a very important point. If you are not satisfied with a picture, this new process allows you to retake it and it says the word retake was emphasized allows you to retake the picture immediately and correct the fault you know that you have a perfect picture on the spot again uh emphasizing on the spot and this is how in human terms he's going to compare his solution to kodak's you never need to be disappointed again. Over and over again, the process repeated, was repeated. No one was disappointed. Okay, so I want to tell you a little bit about Land at 17 years old, his personality, and then the people and ideas that inspired him. So it says, science

and invention consume Land's attention. At 17, he was deeply concerned with how he should spend his time and intellect and what field he could make his own. He carried a romantic vision of science developed by by voracious reading and the certainty that he would achieve scientist scientific success. He was filled with impatience and frustration. He's felt that I felt that You probably have felt that as well. His ideas were focused on the question of which scientific path he should follow. And as he's trying to figure this out, he's doing all this reading. He comes across a series of people that inspired him. And so I'm just going to tell you a little bit about a few of them here.

So it says, Michael Faraday, one of the scientific heroes of the 19th century. His experiments with electromagnetic force stimulated James Clark Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz. He's talking about not only was land inspired by Faraday, but now the author is telling us this direct line of knowledge, this tree or this branch, rather, that Faraday influenced and influenced the careers of other people that went on to influence other people. So it says James Clark Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz. influenced and influenced the careers of other people that went on to influence other people. So it says, James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz, radio, television, radar, a host of current inventions sprang from seeds that were planted by Faraday. That's really great writing there. The greatest experimental scientist of his era, meaning Faraday, he became one of the towering figures in the pantheon. The ambition to

become another Faraday could heat the blood of a 17-year-old aspiring scientist. So again, Faraday's inspiring a young Edwin Land. Edwin Land's inspired a lot of people, but directly inspired Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs talked about right before he died, reading something, he read it when he was a young man, but he's talking, he's reflecting right before he dies about how important it was that he read something that one of his heroes, Edward Land, said,

the importance of building a company at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. And so we see this play out over and over again. I'm just going to list, so the author in this section of the book lists a bunch of people that Land was studying and then what they're known for i'm just going to tell you their names uh some of which i've covered some i will cover

in the future thomas edison alexander graham bell henry ford and george eastman the founder of kodak and to all the studying we see the personality that is present in a young edwin land that he keeps throughout his whole life uh land, like many before him, he had a drive. I'm going to put in the terms of Steve Jobs put it, that he wanted to make a dent into the universe. That's the way Steve Jobs described what he wanted to do. And I think it's a good way to think about what Land, how Land approached this. So let me just read from a few quotes from this section. There was a turmoil within him. He was searching for his field, the field that would make his name known to the world of science. He had read all the scientific literature that was available to him. And so now

he's talking about like the opportunity in front of him and what he learned. Actually, he's not talking, he's writing this. So he says, as I review the nature of the creative drive in the inventive scientists that have been around me, as well as in myself, I find the first event is an urge to make a significant intellectual contribution that can be tangibly embodied in a product or process. So that's what I mean. That's his way of saying he's going to put a dent into the universe. He talks about this over and over again, almost every single book about something to fundamentally, if you want to understand what was important to Edwin Land, he believed in the individual, not the group. And he talks about the great people in history. They were able to push human history forward.

In fact, in one lifetime, they were able to advance humanity many lifetimes. He says Faraday had moved the world forward 100 years. Edison had compressed genius and energy enough for three lifetimes. So Land says, I picked field after field before I decided that the great opportunity was polarized light. So that's what he's saying. He's like, I'm going to be another Faraday. I'm going to be another Edison.

And this is the field I'm going to do this in. The principles of light and how it transmitted had been studied and debated for more than 300 years. And it goes in. He's reading all this book. He's reading about experiments that happened in 1675, 1828, 1852, et cetera, et cetera. So he's building upon all that knowledge. Moving forward, I think this one sentence really does summarize one of the main lessons that I've learned from Edwin Land, and it's the importance of concentration. He says he concentrated ferociously on his quest. So I want to tell you a little bit about the bizarre story of how Land hired his first employee. So it says at this point, he dropped out of Harvard. He's 18 years

old. He's doing experiments in New York City. So it says he responded to his need for assistance in unusual fashion for a scholar and an aspiring scientist. He ran an ad in a newspaper. And this is there was no further explanation of this. This is very bizarre why he referenced it like this. But I thought it was very interesting. Land advertised for a mechanical dentist. I don't know what that means. A dentist technician interested in doing some experimental work, but it never expounds why he chose those words, right? So he says, uh, this about 20 people show up, he hires one of them. And it's this guy named Calibro. He became land's first employee and stayed with him for 25 years. There's also

something to know about land. He he he had a series of people i think it talks about how remarkable people found him right and how unusual people found him is there's a series of people that worked they would be hired you know usually rather quickly and then they stay for multiple decades so it says uh calibro thought he was answering an ad to assist a dentist instead he found himself in a strange basement workshop with a secretive young man of 18 That's a great paragraph to describe Edwin Land. Eating haphazardly, his sleeves rolled up, his shock of dark hair falling in his face as he worked. That's a great paragraph to describe Edwin Land. Calibro did not have the slightest clue as to what Land was doing. So the process they're doing, what Land's trying to do there, this is one of his first inventions,

one of his first patentable inventions. It was the polarizing sheet. It's what they sell to Kodak, what they try to sell to the early automobile industries. They find all different applications, some of which I've covered, so I'm not going to belabor this point. But I do want to pull out this section right here because really this is land on how to approach your work. And I found this fascinating. So it says, each of these puzzles had an almost infinite number of possible solutions. Land was evolving a way of attacking the imponderables.

He described it a few years later, direct quote from Land. Of course, the secret that we had then was in knowing that if you dream of something worth doing, then simply go to work on it and don't think of anything of personalities, of emotional conflicts, or of money, or family distractions. If you think detail by detail of what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream, even though the end is a long way off. If there are 5,000 steps to be taken, you start by taking the first 10 and then 20 after that. It is amazing how quickly you get through the first 4,990. The last 10 steps you never seem to work out, but you keep on coming nearer to giving the world something worth having so at this point in the story land still a young man he teams up with

george wheelwright um i'm only going to cover the parts i haven't covered in past podcast so he meets wheelwright and we see how land the reason i want to bring this part out to you is because there's a lot about edwin land that reminds me of claude shannon and i covered claude shannon i think was back on like maybe founders number 92 and 95, right? Venture of information theory, one of the most, maybe the most single, most brilliant person I've ever covered on the podcast. Definitely among, if not the most brilliant, one of the most brilliant. But this section was very fascinating to me because it speaks to both their, like what motivated them to work on what they

motivated and it was this internal curiosity right i think charlie munger would tell you follow your own natural drift right and i found it fascinating that they both work on a problem until they are satisfied with understanding it but then they leave the documenting uh of that solution to others um in the the books on claude Shannon talks about, you know, he discovered something and they would, they'd find half written papers about this wonderful scientific invention or solution to a problem decades later. He's like, oh yeah, I figured it out, but I'd never bothered to finish the paper on it. So it says, uh, land had the ability to charm anyone who interested him. He and Will Wright, although opposites in appearance and

manner had much in common, Neither was in awe of Harvard. They both dropped out. I don't know if... Wheelwright didn't drop out. I think he graduated, but he didn't finish his graduate degree there. Both had left on their own for an extended period to prove something to themselves and perhaps to their parents. They were both brilliant, excited by science, unconventional, and filled with energy. Wheelwright was also teaching a course at Harvard that Land took. And so this is a little

bit about that. Land was the brightest student in the name of the courses, electricity and magnetism. So it says Land was the brightest student in the course. And he says the brightest by far, Will Wright said. But here's the problem. He couldn't get Land to finish his work. So he says the instructor, meaning Will Wright, experienced some difficulty with his star. He would cover himself with distinction, running the lab and doing the experiments, and then he'd take it home to write it up. But when the day came to hand in the paper, it wouldn't be there. So this is Wheelwright describing this bizarre process that's very similar to Claude Shannon. One day I got his wife on the phone and I said, Mrs. Land, can't you do something to get him to finish it? She said he works on it as long as he doesn't understand it. But as soon as he understands it, he wants someone else to do it, meaning someone else to write the paper. He's moving on to something else that he wants to satisfy,

this curiosity, this driving curiosity that he has to fulfill. And so even in the very early days of land wheelwright company uh edwin land's mind is becoming known he's making inventions he's making scientific progress and he's getting recruited to work for other companies right and so wheelwright's worried he's going to leave the company but in this exchange where he's worried about Lan being recruited, we see an insight into Lan's obsessive personality. I think back to one of history's greatest obsessive, Enzo Ferrari. Go back and listen to the podcast I did on that. He woke up, worked on Ferrari all day, and then went to sleep.

Outside of Ferrari, his only other interest was his son Dino. That's it. That's a good explanation of Edwin Lan. So it says, Will Wright confronted his partner. One of their research people told me that you want to work there. George, Land replied. I've told you what it's like. They start at eight o'clock and they work until 430. Then everything shuts down and they all go home. They don't work on Saturdays or Sundays. They keep telling me I should work for them. Well, do you want to? Of course not.

How could I get anything done? And so we see this obsessiveness, this obsessive nature of Lanz when this is Lanz's response to their first contract from Kodak. They're getting a large contract at the time. I think it was like $5,000 in advance and $5,000 when the job is completed. They have a contract, but they'd actually have to invent the process. They don't know how to produce their invention, right? And so this is pretty crazy. He says, for the first time,

they had an immutable deadline. They moved cots and air mattresses into the shop. So they're talking about, this is Wheelwright describing this process. He says, I came in the morning before Christmas. The next time either Land or I changed our clothes was on January 11th. The product they delivered had by this time been christened Polaroid. I'm just going to go off a little random tangent here because Land's life intersects with two other historical figures. He wants to set up a booth at Polaroid to publicize the company at the New York City World Fair

it's being run and constructed by Robert Moses I'm actually halfway through the audio version the audible version of the Pulitzer Prize winning biography it's like 60 hours long I think it's 1300 pages something like that on Robert Moses it's written by Caro it's called The Power Broker it's a really fascinating book if something like that, on Robert Moses. It was written by Caro.

It's called The Power Broker. It's a really fascinating book. If you're interested about the early history of New York and power in general, I'd recommend picking it up. But this is also where Edwin Land meets J.P. Morgan. So it says, Will Wright's father had been at Harvard with J.P. Morgan. Will Wright remembered, when father decided that Din, that's the childhood nickname and what Edwin Lane wanted everybody to call him, that Din and I had gone far enough and that we were really doing something, he sent us down to see Morgan. So they're trying to raise money at this time. It was just after they had that 1936 bomb attack on 23 Wall Street. Lane and I turned

up armed with all bunch of packages. It's like, get out of here. What are you doing? They have a letter from Will Wright's father. It's the letter sent into J.P. Morgan. And J.P.'s like, yeah, okay, that's a friend of mine. Send him in. It says if Land was intimidated by the lines of Wall Street, he did not show it and they did not realize it. Nothing concrete came out of the Morgan interview. And I bring that up because one of the most requested books is that Pulitzer Prize biography on J.P. Morgan.

I will eventually get around to reading it and then make it into a future episode of Founders. All right. So I want to move forward. There's just a sentence or two here that's really interesting because studying the early days of Polaroid, it was very, very surprising. And it's just a reminder that success is not a straight line. It's up and down, down and up, and up and down, down and up until they finally hit on the land camera.

But at this time, again, they're trying to sell their developments to other people, other companies, so they can use their technology and their products, which land eventually realizes, hey, I'm obsessed with control. This is stupid. I'm not going to do this.

But they did have a couple hits, but they were really fads. So one of them was Polaroid Dayglasses. It says Polaroid Dayglasses were becoming popular. Polaroids sold more than a million pairs in 1939. A few years later, less than two years later, the fad evaporated and they were left with a lot of inventory. And so a few pages later, the author elaborates and expounds on, you know, the early days of Polaroid being full of struggle. 1940 had been the most difficult year in the Polaroid's brief history. The young business effort had begun to falter, a continuing source of disappointment and frustration to the company and to Land.

Expenses were on the increase, sales were not. The Headlight program, which they thought was going to be a foundation of a giant business, had ground to a halt amid fencing matches with one Detroit spokesman after another. The 10th year of the Depression had no better time to sell safety to Detroit than the sixth. Land had begun to wonder if the time would ever come. Nothing was more frustrating than being dependent on someone else for the opportunity to succeed. And this sentence is the most important sentence of the section to me. Nothing told Land that he had built a business that could survive, let alone grow. And I bring that up to you because he started this experimentation on

this path 14 years ago, where we are in the story. So for 14 years, he's just got a series of struggle after struggle, minor success that eventually pops and goes straight to failure. And yet he's still persevering. He's still pushing through. Now, there is an alternate history here that I like to think about because if it wasn't for this one sentence, let me read it to you first. What he did not tell them was that the United States Navy had saved the company. there's a very good chance that they don't have the money to sustain what they're doing and they go out of business and you uh you and i never actually hear uh the name edwin land so i've covered on uh on past podcasts on edwin land about what he was doing for world war ii uh does stuff for general patent does stuff for the u.s navy the u.s army invents a bunch of stuff i'm going to skip over that going to go right to uh where this is also famous that he gets the idea like this. It's

called the instant image idea where he's taking pictures of his three-year-old daughter and she's like, you know, daddy, why can't I see the picture now instead of, you know, seven days from now? And so Peter uses that experience to introduce us to this concept of a Landian question. I thought it was interesting. Now his mind was a whirl. Jennifer's innocent query was the epitome of a Landian question. So he's going to define that for us, which took nothing for granted, accepted no common knowledge, tested the cliche and treated conventional wisdom as an oxymoron.

His first thought was to wonder why he had not asked the question himself. So years later, people always ask him, like, how did that, you know, how did you arrive at such a brilliant insight in just a matter of moments? And that's, he's going to describe to us, like, that's not an accurate way to describe it, right? It's a culmination of a life's work. So when I read, when this paragraph I read to you, or I'm about to read to you, it really is to me a reinforcement that there's a very practical reason

why you should keep learning and keep collecting experiences because you're going to use this knowledge for an opportunity far into the future, one that you can't see yet. And so Land describes that process. And this direct quote from him, he says, what is hard to convey in anything short of a thick book is the years of rich experience that

were compressed into those three years, the product development, where that occurred right after the question that his daughter asked him. It was as if all that we had done in learning to make polarizers, the knowledge of plastics and the properties of vicious liquids, that's not how you pronounce that word, the preparation of microscopic crystals smaller than the wavelength of light, the laminating of plastic sheets, living in the world of colloids, that's not how you pronounce it either, in super saturated solutions, had been a school and a preparation both for the first day in which I suddenly knew how to make a one-step dry photographic process. And for the following three years in which we made the very vivid dream into a solid reality.

I love how he describes. He says all these experiences, all the stuff he had learned had been a school and preparation. And this invention comes at the right time because Land has a very real sense of urgency. He sees the end of the war coming and realizes, hey end of the world end of the war comes the contract stopped we may go out of business so he this is land on the the sense of urgency that was needed this time he says it is taking a big chance land said but there's a possibility that the navy contracts would be canceled in any case now the war is over we have to develop another business as fast as we can. It will be a race, a close race. And this sentence gives you an idea of the precarious financial

position that Polaroid finds itself in. If we win, we survive. A race to finish the camera before we run out of money. And we see here, you could characterize this section as burn the boats, burning the boats, which is a well-known phenomenon throughout human history, or really a lesson on human nature and the fundamental way Edwin Land understood what motivated and how to get the most out of people. So he says, everything seemed to land to be moving with maddening slowness. He decided to light a fire that, in fact, he might not be able to eventually contend with. The winter meeting for the Optical Society of America had been announced for February 21st, 1947. Land told Polaroid, Land told them that Polaroid would disclose the camera system in New York, meaning he just set that date. He's like, okay, that's when it's happening, February 21st, 1947.

That's the day we're going to be ready. They're not anywhere close to being ready, by the way. The two, talking about the people he's telling, the two executives, the two were appalled by the audacity of even considering a date for public demonstration, let alone committing to the society. Land calmed their apprehension by describing it as an occasion to present a scientific paper. So it's like, oh, maybe we want to do a product demonstration. We will present the results of a scientific paper.

They know that's bullshit. That's not happening. That's not true, Land. So he says his associates did not believe that he would limit the presentation to just a paper, and he knew it. In truth, Land's plan extended well beyond the scientific paper. He knew how daunting were the hundreds of interlocking problems Polaroid faced.

The survival imperative was clear and present to them all. They had no alternative but to succeed with the camera. This is what I mean by burning the boats. Everyone left at Polaroid knew that, and at the present rate of decline, the business, the company, and their jobs might not survive 1947. Nonetheless, Land held on to the February 21, 1947 date as a weapon available to use against his own people, including himself, when their efforts slowed as he knew they would. In the face of the implacability of nature, even committed men and women flagged.

They needed an additional stimulus. It's a genius insight by Land. Sometimes survival wasn't a sharp enough goad. Public exposure could be compelling, even terrifying. His people were all capable of more than they knew. Land would prepare the paper, but there would be much more going on the night of the 21st. They would succeed.

They would overcome nature. They would be ready. So now we get to the point where the author actually goes and interviews Polaroid. He wasn't even sure he wanted a job. He was in the publishing industry doing advertising and promotion

for publishing. And Polaroid is getting this reputation. It's like this weird, bizarre place, right? That's slowly building a technical monopoly protected by a wall of patents, right? And so he's doing this strange interview. He's like, well, I'm not even sure I'm interviewing here. I'm just coming here to talk to you. And kind of like the guy at the end of the interview, this guy named Stan, he's just like, well, you're going to love it. I'm going to love you. Like, let's just do this. But the author, this is fantastic. The author asks a question because it's the reputation that Polaroid has. It's very bizarre, right?

You can't get to the top by standing, by fitting in. Like differentiation is extremely important. And Polaroid definitely has a reputation as that. So he asks a question. And I love this. And I love the question, but I love even more the answer. So the question he asks is, why is Polaroid a nutty place? The response is fantastic.

And this is the response. Stan's working very closely with Edwin Lane. He says, to start with, it's run by a man who has more brains than anyone has a right to. He doesn't believe anything until he's discovered it and proved it for himself. Because of that, he never looks at things the way you and I do. He has no small talk. He has no preconceived notions. He starts from the beginning with everything. That's why we have a camera that takes pictures and develops them right away. Isn't that what a camera is supposed to do? And then the author responds, I don't know. And he continues this line. It's hilarious. Of course it is.

It's obvious. But Land was the first person to think about it that way. The rest of us always assumed that you had to send the negatives to a photo finisher. I've been a photographer all my life and I'm a smart guy, but I didn't think of it. It never even occurred to me, let alone how to do it. That's a whole other story. And it's one of my favorite stories illustrates this idea that he's not interested in small talk, which we've seen, you know, in several different examples in some of the biographies that you and I have studied. But Land would call you up. He would say, hey, how are you doing? He's ring ring phone rings. It's like, hey, hey, Dan, studied, but Land would call you up. He wouldn't say, hey, how are you doing? He'd ring, ring, phone rings.

He's like, hey, hey, Dan, what's up? He would say nothing. He would say, tell me something interesting. And you'd think for a minute, tell him something interesting, and then you'd hear nothing but silence for a few minutes on the other end of the line while he thinks. I just thought that was very amusing. So this is now the author telling us more on how Land worked. This is happening in 1962. And the author is responsible for all the marketing and advertising. He's

spending like $50 million a year of Polaroid's money, and Land barely checked on him. He just made sure if he thought the advertising was high quality, he would leave it alone. So he comes into his office to ask him a question and i thought this this was very fascinating lan was sleeping in his in his lounge chair his feet elevated an old blanket pulled up under his chin when i opened the door to his office he had been working until a few hours earlier in his laboratory he and a team of 12 had been had put in some 18 hours interrupted only for tea cookies and lamb chops and later for roast beef sandwiches land believed in feeding the brain a lab technician might occasionally faint from exhaustion but never from hunger land hated to stop working once begun on a course of action

he wanted to experiment with the hypothesis until the hypothesis was proved. He worked, this is really, this is what I mean about really great writing. And you could tell, again, I think of go back to if you read David Ogilvie's books, you know, Warren Buffett called David Ogilvie a genius. He spent his entire life around researchers and copywriters, and he was trained as a copywriter himself. And you could tell because his entire business is based on persuasive writing. And so when he sits down to write his biography or a book on advertising, it's riveting. It holds your attention the whole time. So it says, he worked like a predator, stalking a solution, a proof with perpetual patience and perpetual energy. His intuitive leaps had landed him on the neck of his prey too often for him not to believe that he could do it next time and the

time after that. Although his assistants were sometimes more than 20 years younger than Land, he regularly worked them to exhaustion and continued with fresh replacements for hours longer. Many of them had graduated with no scientific background. Land proved many times over that a bright young liberal arts student could learn the routines of a laboratory and the structure of scientific discipline as rapidly as applicants with technical experience. He liked the fact that his students had little to unlearn. They started in a pursuit of a hypothesis, experimented until they could go no further,

then twisted and turned, looking for a new trail that would lead them somewhere. They would wander for days, weeks, and even years. Science is an awkward, disorganized, inefficient activity, he said. It is simply more efficient than any other human activity. Like I said earlier, this book is particularly wonderful because it contains so much of Land in his own words and just common conversation that would happen in any company. I'm just going to pull out one sentence and I'm going to ask who said this,

Steve Jobs or Edwin Land? Taste is as rare as the unicorn. This one paragraph gives us an illustration of what was most important to Polaroid. Camera design took pride of place among the engineering functions because from design of a new camera, all other company decisions flowed. In the jargon of the 80s, Polaroid was a product-driven company. Planning was little influenced by market research. Financial concerns are competition. If products drove the company, land drove the products. Polaroid competed only with itself. Something that's obvious the more you study and read about Edwin Land, he was very careful about

what he let into his mind. He would read, he would think, and he would experiment, but he primarily wanted to think from first principles. And I think this sentence is a great summary of that. Unencumbered by other people's ideas, Land raced ahead. Land had a belief that it is your duty to keep learning. It's a belief I share. If you're listening to this, it's obviously a belief that you share. And this is what he says. Implicit was Land's faith in education. Direct quote from Land here. The individual in industry will be

better qualified to increase his competence and at the same, make his job fully satisfying if he continues his education as an integral part of his working career. So I'm fast forwarding ahead in the story. The most important product Polaroid ever made was the SX-70 camera. by the question of his three-year-old daughter that took him 30 years to get to the final form that he wanted, where that's the one you just press the button, out comes the picture, and 30, 60 seconds later, you can view it. There's no extra step, okay? So I want to read this section to you,

but it reminded me of this quote that appeared in one of the biographies that he did on Walt Disney. And he said we are innovating i'll tell you the cost when we are done and so disney like land like jobs focus on the very best highest quality uh components to their products first and then worried about everything after they were they were all three of them were driven by by making the the very best product possible so it says that was so typical of land i thought to insist that the camera be covered in leather so the the original sx70 cameras had

leather covering not a leather lookalike plastic but real cowhide. Expensive, hard to handle, difficult to bond to the surface of the camera body. But it smelled good and it felt good. Land had an instinct for packaging. He listened to all the arguments about the cost being $3 a camera more with leather, and then he overrode them. He was right. I looked at the camera on the table in front of me. Land was a great marketer, but he would never admit it. Marketing was not one of the attributes he wished to be recognized for. Science? Engineering? Social philosophy? The quality of his prose? Yes. Titles? Honors? Degrees? Yes.

But not doctor of marketing. So this book differs from the book I covered last week because the book I covered last week was published, I think in like 1978, 1979. Land was still in control of the company. This is published after Land is forced out. This is what Steve Jobs called the dumbest thing you ever heard because they lost, Polar lost a bunch of money

on this invention called Polar Vision. That Land, this is one thing where I didn't understand what land was doing because the sx-70 was such a technological advancement it had a bunch of production issues that still need to be ironed out and so at the same time they're still doing that he he does he pushes forward with the invention of polar vision so like two brand new uh highly complex products at the same time. So this is what working again,

this is where the author, uh, does a great job of describing these things to us. Uh, this is a working on the SX 70 and polar vision was like, he says it was, it was as if during the battle for Britain, Churchill had been making plans for the colonization of the Antarctic.

So during this time, you also see like, it's, it's, it's it's it's bizarre that he wanted this product to exist as well um because at the time they're focused on instant photography it's you know 90 of the revenue something like that um and so he's like hey instead of a picture let's do a a two and a half minute video with no sound even though you could buy a recorder that had sound, you can make longer videos.

So this is his thinking, but I think the author hits on the fundamental problem with this. So it says, Land visualizes a system where the cassettes were stored as books or records in a library to be taken down and played on impulse. The format, two and a half minutes long, he described as an important new medium,

more exciting, revealing, and satisfying than still pictures, but escaping the inevitable tedium of unedited home movies. And then this is the problem. The why, meaning why does this product exist? The why was never examined. And so it was a cause of failure. And unfortunately, he's forced out of the company.

The weird part is I haven't found any book that covered in great detail what happened like why other than yeah they lost a couple million dollars on this thing but who like who set into force like how was he kicked out if he had total control and so the further complicated matters at this point at this point in puller's history they're engaged in what what at the time becomes the largest um patent infringement lawsuit ever they sue kodak for violating the products. And I'm going to talk more about that because next week's book is a monster. It's like 600 pages. And it's written by one of the attorneys that successfully defended Polaroid against,

or excuse me, successfully, I guess, is it? They didn't defend them because they don't want to bring the suit. But basically, they're the ones, he was one of the attorneys that helped Polaroid be successful in suing Kodak for patent infringement. And it will give you an insight into how Land approached what might have been, from his viewpoint, his greatest, his greatest struggle of his life. And so this is just one sentence. In the months before the trial, he retired to his office, emerging only for board meetings

or any other unavoidable occasions. He was by far, Edwin Lane was by far the star witness in this trial. And it's because of his command of the technology, of the process, and his communication skills that led to, like I said, the largest judgment in history.

It was like almost a billion dollars, 900 and something million dollars. And now I got to, I think, the part of the book that prompted such a deep emotional response to the life of Edwin Land because he lived a remarkable life, but I don't know if the ending had a happy ending. So I'm not going to say anything after I finish this section because I think I want the words

to just sit in your mind for a little bit. Just a reminder that if you want to buy this book and support the podcast at the same time, there is a link that is in the show notes. It doesn't matter to me if you buy this book, another book. I can't tell you how important reading biographies is. It doesn't matter if you read the physical this book another book i just i can't tell you how important reading biographies is it doesn't matter if you read the physical book the kindle the audible

i just i think you're like i sincerely believe your life will be better the more you read and expose yourself to these life stories it doesn't matter if it's a book i covered on the podcast or not it doesn't matter if you use the affiliate link or not that doesn't like that's not important what's important to me is that you're reading because I do think it is the outside of taking care of your health, spending time with your family, getting the rest you need, and working on your craft. There is not a better activity, one that you will derive more of a return on your investment than reading. It is so fundamentally important. Okay. So with that section, or that statement

rather, let me get to the point. This is where the author is going to visit Land at his home after they have both left Polaroid. Land was asleep. He was talking to me, and he fell asleep at the end of his sentence. His eyes closed for a moment moment I thought, but then they stayed closed. I sat down quietly and looked at him. He was no longer chairman of the board, chief executive officer, president, chief operating officer, or director of research. He had resigned and retired. He had sold his stock. His last tie with Polaroid was a contract which guaranteed him the office and the study that he had occupied for 40 years would be

his for the rest of his life. And six months longer, he had told me with a glint in his eye. I had left as well. He in August, I in October of 1982. I didn't have to ask him if he had regrets. He didn't have to ask me. We had both been at Polaroid for too long. Land for all of his life. I for 24 years. But of course, I told myself, the point is that only change is unchanging. We both had a longer ride than most people get. Lan ran his company longer than any of America's great business leaders. Longer than Thomas Edison. Longer than Henry Ford. Longer than George Eastman. Giving it up had been the hardest thing he had done in his life. It had been an emotional trauma that engulfed everyone near him. None of us escaped.

We watched as Land tore himself away from the most important thing in his life. The lines in his face were graven deeper than they had been. His silences lasted longer. His eyes more focused inward. He accomplished this surgery on himself as he did most things, in his own personal, unexpected, passionate, and enigmatic way. He had written something in one of the annual reports in the 1970s that was hovering in the back of my mind, but I couldn't bring it forward. In 1940, he had been named one of the National Modern Pioneers. It was a singular honor.

He was 31. He had worked without ceasing, without deviating, for 14 years, since boyhood. To become what? A pioneer was as good a name as I could put to it. He had wanted to create new things. The polarizer and the instant camera would remain the best known. But perhaps his most original invention had been his company. It was no less the product of a conscious process of

experimentation and insight and repeated failure and creation and ultimate success than had been the other inventions. In the slaw of the depression, he was already shaping the idea of a new sort of corporation whose characteristics were so unusual as to be bizarre, almost ludicrous. At the time when steel companies, automobile factories, and textile mills were slowing to a halt, spilling workers into the streets, he was talking and thinking and writing about a company founded on science that would design new products not imagined by the public, which would be attracted to the products because they filled an unperceived need. He wanted a company to create an environment for art at a time when many were worried about meeting the next payroll. He talked about a company where the work life would be so satisfying

that workers would look forward to the day beginning and regret its end, while sweatshops were in their heyday and unions fought to establish basic rights on the job. These were the ravings of a pioneer. Land opened his eyes. He looked into me. I had the feeling of being examined, interviewed. You were asleep, Din, I said.

I was a little concerned. Nonsense. I was resting my eyes for a moment. Why would you think I was asleep? Well, I spoke to you and you didn't answer. I was thinking. He smiled his charming little boy smile. There is nothing more refreshing than thinking for a few minutes with your eyes closed. I suppose that's how you survived all those board meetings. I rose to take my leave. Din, what was it that you wrote in one of your shareholder letters about the future? About the past and the future? I can't bring it to mind. The smile disappeared.

He brought it to mind instantly. The present is the past biting into the future. Why do you ask?