Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 2, 1991 TAG: 9103020091
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
For decades, as head of Polaroid Corp., Land provided the ideas and impetus for a long line of innovative photographic products.
The family declined to disclose the cause of death.
It was in response to his 3-year-old daughter's bewilderment at why a camera could not instantly produce pictures that Land conceived the idea of the instant camera in 1943.
Land, a largely self-taught physicist, was out for a stroll when he hit upon the idea that led to his invention: a camera that would produce developed photographs as soon as its shutter clicked.
Land demonstrated his new photographic process in 1947 at a scientific meeting in New York.
The process entailed exposing the film and then developing the negative at the same time that the print was made: A system of rollers squeezed the exposed film up against the paper that was to become the print.
As the rollers moved the negative and the paper along, they also broke open a small sealed pod attached to the paper. The pod held developing chemicals that the rollers spread between the negative and the paper as a sandwich's spread is applied.
At first the system yielded sepia images, but in 1950 it was altered so that the pictures came out in black-and-white.
Then, in 1959, a long-held ambition of Land's was fulfilled: He announced that an instant color-photograph system had been devised at Polaroid. A camera embodying that system went on the market in 1963.
As Polaroid's longtime guiding light, he oversaw the development of products that included the first Polaroid Land Camera of 1948 and a long succession of other devices in the field that he termed instant photography.
Under Land, Polaroid's products gained wide acceptance. In the 1960s, a Polaroid marketing executive estimated that half the households in the United States had acquired Polaroid cameras.
After his retirement, Land continued to conduct research in several scientific fields. In 1980, he created and financed the Rowland Institute for Science, a research organization in Cambridge, Mass., which in recent years developed microscopic laser "tweezer" beams capable of manipulating single-cell organisms as small as bacteria.
Land was awarded many honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science.
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by CNB