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NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES EDWIN HERBERT LAND 1909–1991 A Biographical Memoir by VICTOR K. MC ELHENY Biographical Memoirs, VOLUME 77 PUBLISHED 1999 BY THE NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS WASHINGTON, D.C. Photo by J. J. Scarpetti EDWIN HERBERT LAND May 7, 1909-March 1, 1991 BY VICTOR K. MC ELHENY ESS THAN TWO WEEKS after Edwin Land’s death in 1991, L members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (and the author) met to plan a day-long memorial confer- ence. Swiftly, they decided on a title, “Light and Life.” The agenda, however, was more difficult. Land was not just a scientist-industrialist. Speakers would have to encompass topics ranging from color vision to business innovation, from military intelligence to patronage of architecture. As the group talked about Land’s character, Jerome Wiesner ex- claimed, “Din never had an ordinary reaction to anything!” Wiesner was referring to the extraordinary versatility of Land’s mind and conversation, which enabled him to con- centrate intensely on solutions to problems, and to charm and win over the talented people to tackle them. Until late in his life, he took pleasure in leaping up stairs two at a time. Besides energy, the dominant impressions Land cre- ated were artistic sensibility, a sense of drama, delight in experiment, relentless optimism. Less evident was a remark- able ability to keep both work and people in compartments. Less than six feet tall, Land had intense eyes and a shock of black hair that riveted attention on him. Despite a soft voice and frequent use of half-sentences, Land was able to con- vert interior monologues into dramatic public presentations. 3 4 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS The watchword was: “If anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing to excess.” This principle applied also to behavior in the laboratory. He told a press interviewer, “My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concen- tration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn’t know they had.” Land’s attitudes from boyhood were those of a physicist, but he is best known as the inventor and re-inventor of instant photography from the mid-1940s to the early 1980s. Those innovations had a prehistory: twenty years’ work on the first plastic-sheet light polarizers, the great invention of his youth. The polarizers in turn led him into work on the Vectograph process of three-dimensional photography, which found its first important application in reconnaissance dur- ing World War II. His desire for autonomy and the chal- lenges of reliably manufacturing his inventions reinforced his determination not to be absorbed by large corporations with large research budgets. But as a pioneer of the science- based company from the early 1930s, he frequently formed alliances with big firms, such as Eastman Kodak, to manu- facture components of the systems. He became a vigorous prophet of the efficacy of science-based companies in pro- moting innovation and providing all their workers a rewarding life on the job. Research on color vision, which he described in lectures at the National Academy of Sciences in 1958 and 1983, brought him into conflict with many in psychology—but eventually led to collaborations with neurophysiologists. The crisis of the 1950s, when thermonuclear weapons were suc- ceeding nuclear ones and an open United States confronted a closed Soviet Union, brought Land into a crucial role of energizing and supervising high-altitude airplane and satel- lite surveillance from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s. Such surveillance, by giving incontrovertible physical evidence of EDWIN HERBERT LAND 5 the size of opposing forces, helped limit U.S. spending on weapons systems and later provided a principal factual basis for a succession of arms limitation treaties. Land thought constantly about education and research and sought new institutional forms. In 1957, he challenged the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to provide direct experience of research to undergraduates, thus helping to spur MIT’s even- tual adoption of such a system. In the late 1960s, he helped formulate and advocate the program of federal assistance to public television. He endowed the new house of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and founded the Rowland Institute for Science in the same city. PERSONAL HISTORY As refugees from the ever-tightening persecution of Jews during the reign of Russian Tsar Alexander III (1881-94), Land’s grandfather Avram Salomonovitch, his grandmother Ella, Land’s father Harry, and uncles Sam and Louis, sailed from Odessa and landed at Castle Garden in New York City. In an incident typical for immigrants to America, they ac- quired the name of Land and Avram’s name was American- ized to Abraham. Once in America, Abraham and Ella Land had two more sons and three daughters. Abraham started a scrap metal business. Many of Abraham and Ella’s children settled in Brooklyn, where two sons became lawyers and a third entered the secondhand machinery business. The three daughters married, respectively, a lawyer, an architect, and a retailer. Later in life, Land had few contacts with rela- tives, including eighteen first cousins. After his father’s death, in 1965, Land told a nephew, “My work is my life.” Harry Land’s scrap metal business took him to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and then to Norwich, Connecticut. There he handled most of the scrap from Electric Boat, a major manu- 6 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS facturer of submarines, shrewdly evaluating the content and worth of the metal he was recycling. Harry and his wife Matha Goldfaden had a daughter Helen, and in 1909 (when Harry was twenty-six) a son, who was named Edwin Herbert Land. Helen found the name hard to pronounce, and called her little brother “Din,” a nickname that stuck. In 1929, Land married Helen (Terre) Maislen of Hartford, Connecticut. His wife and he had two daughters, Jennifer Land Dubois and Valerie Land Smallwood. Mrs. Land and they survived him at his death in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 1, 1991. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1953, during his service as president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. POLARIZER As a boy, Land acquired a fascination with the kaleido- scopes and stereopticons so notably studied in the nine- teenth century by the English optical scientist David Brewster. He also came across the textbook Physical Optics written by Robert W. Wood of Johns Hopkins University. The first edi- tion of Wood’s book (1905) had become well enough known to be cited in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica article on polarized light. Wood’s teacher had been Henry Rowland, who in turn had studied with Hermann Helmholtz. Land was fascinated and read Wood’s second edition (1915), he said, like the Bible. At the age of thirteen, at a boys’ camp not far from Norwich, Land’s fascination with polarization deepened when the camp’s leader used a piece of Iceland spar to extinguish glare from a table top. Also at the camp, a near-collision in a car at night with a farmer’s wagon underlined the perils of nighttime driving. Headlights should be stronger, but how could they be prevented from blind- ing the drivers of oncoming cars? The boys discussed how glare might be controlled by polarization. In 1926, the year EDWIN HERBERT LAND 7 his sister Helen graduated from Wellesley College, Land entered Harvard College. In a hurry to do actual research on optics, particularly polarization, Land left a few months later and went to New York, where he spent long hours in the great reading room of the New York Public Library. His idealism was roused, as he often recounted, when he walked down a major avenue in New York. The procession of head- lights on the line of approaching cars embodied for him the primary reason for developing a thin and cheap polarizer. Land began with experiments on reflection polarizers, but went on to repeat William B. Herapath’s nineteenth century attempts at making giant thin crystals of iodosulphate of quinine in the hope of making simple polarizers for microscopes. Land had no more success than Herapath. Faced with this impasse, Land reversed course and envis- aged a plastic material to be coated on sheets of film that would contain billions of tiny needle-like crystals in each square centimeter (in one dimension smaller than the wave- length of visible light). At first by electric or magnetic fields or later by stretching, the microcrystals were aligned to act as a polarizer. In 1929, with the invention perfected and the first patent applied for, Land returned to Harvard for three more years of study. His work on polarizers so intrigued Theodore Lyman, head of Harvard’s physics laboratory, that undergraduate Land was given a separate lab. In 1932, Land gave the first and so far the only Harvard physics department seminar by an undergraduate, “A New Polarizer for Light in the Form of an Extensive Synthetic Sheet.” Instead of remaining to get a degree, however, Land pushed ahead with manufacture and commercialization of the polarizer, founding his own company in partnership with George Wheelwright III, a Harvard physics instructor. Because of the potential uses in controlling headlight glare— and in viewing three-dimensional movies—Land’s invention 8 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS received attention at the research laboratories of General Motors, General Electric, and Eastman Kodak. In 1934, Kodak became the first customer, buying polarizer sheet for camera filters. The next year, American Optical began buying polarizer-laminated sunglass lenses, opening the way to reorganization of Land’s enterprise as Polaroid Corporation in 1937.

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