9/12/2023 0 Comments Edwin land![]() ![]() Over the next several years Land and Wheelwright set up operations at various locations in the Boston area where they continued to expand their laboratory and manufacturing facilities to design and build specialized equipment and machines that would produce polarizing sheets. 12 In 1933, they formed Land-Wheelwright Laboratories, and Land received patent #1,918,848, for "Polarizing Refracting Bodies," the first of more than 500 patents he would acquire during his lifetime. 11 At a Harvard Physics Colloquium in 1932, Land presented a paper on his synthetic polarizing material that same year Wheelwright convinced him to leave college before graduation to start a company together. ![]() Wheelwright III, the department granted Land his own laboratory, an unusual resource for a young undergraduate. Thanks to the influence of one of his physics instructors, George W. Land returned to Harvard and continued his research on polarizers in the Harvard Physics department. In New York, Land met Helen Maislen, known as Terre, who had studied under Clarence Kennedy, an art historian at Smith College, and the two married in 1929. Brown, a patent lawyer, and his attorney, Julius Silver, Land applied for his first patent for a light-polarizing sheet. Moving the second filter back and forth created variable vibrations of light. Land found that placing one polarizing filter over another at a right angle halted all light vibrations. This synthetic polarizing material could be used to block out reflective waves of light that glance off the surface of an object and appear as glare. He then learned that by coating a thin sheet of plastic with microscopic crystals, he could stretch and align the crystals before the material dried. Land's breakthrough came in 1928 when he discovered that with a magnetic field he could align microscopic crystals suspended with a lacquer solution in a way that oriented scattered vibrations of light in one direction. ![]() But low-cost polarizing material remained elusive, as these artificially produced crystals, called herapathite, were too small and expensive to create a useful material. William Bird Herapath discovered that combining iodine with quinine salt produced tiny crystals with light-polarizing characteristics that could direct and block planes of light. It was commonly understood that planes of light normally vibrate on vertical and horizontal planes and on angles between those planes. "Then, you get it straight and you embody it, and during that period of embodiment you have a feeling of almost divine guidance." 10 You want to be free to think not for an hour at a time, or three hours at a time, but for two days or two weeks, if possible, without interruption," he reasoned. Over the course of the next three years, in the reading room of the New York Public Library, where Land had access to the Library's impressive collection of scientific volumes, and in the basements of a series of rented apartments, he devoted himself to the development of a synthetic light-polarizing material. After the fall semester, he took a leave of absence to live in New York City. I decided that the world needed a synthetic polarizer, an extensive sheet of polarizing material, in order to be able to carry out on a large scale all the things implied by Wood's stories." 8 Land began to develop a core belief that "the role of industry is to sense a deep human need, then bring science and technology to bear on filling that need." 9 As automobile ownership increased exponentially through the 1920s, Land aligned his research of polarizers with what he considered to be the worthy goal of eliminating the increasing danger of highlight glare at night. polarized light and mirages and Wood's own way of doing things. In high school at the Norwich Free Academy, Land excelled in physics and became enthralled with the classic Physical Optics by Robert W. To a child, a photograph gives a permanent thing that is both outside himself and part of himself." 7Įdwin Land was born May 7, 1909, to Matie Goldfaden Land, who studied physics, and Harry Land, who ran a scrap metal and real estate business in Connecticut. He appreciated what a photograph meant from a child's perspective: "The world around the child is shifting and fleeting. Kaleidoscopes and stereoscopes, optical wonders of the 19th century, held a particular fascination for Land. Edwin Land, "Annual Christmas Message to Employees of the Polaroid Corporation," Decem4Įdwin Land defined greatness as bringing "to the world a wonderful and special way of solving unsolved problems." 5 He remembered after his father chastised him as young boy for dismantling a phonograph, from then on "nothing or nobody could stop me from carrying through the execution of an experiment." 6 As a child, he was drawn to the beauty and utility of chemistry and optics. ![]()
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