A Culture of Innovation

Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, embraced two central concepts for his company: the development of new and useful products, and what he called the “second great product of industry,” a rewarding working life that cultivated the talents of his employees. “We are becoming a prototype company, a company which is learning how to make the all-day working life a worthwhile thing,” he explained. “The function of industry is not just the making of goods, the function of industry is the development of people.”1

Land’s research efforts in light polarization during the 1920s and early 1930s resulted in the successful manufacture and sale of synthetic polarizing filters to eliminate glare. His first enterprise, Land-Wheelwright Laboratories, was formed in 1932 and was reincorporated as the Polaroid Corporation in 1937. The company produced light-polarizing materials for a variety of products including sunglass lenses, camera filters, and desk lamps.

Among the early creative consultants to Polaroid was art historian Clarence Kennedy. A professor of Renaissance history, Kennedy’s multivolume work Studies in the History and Criticism of Sculpture included hundreds of black-and-white photographs of ancient and Renaissance sculpture that he took for teaching and research. A masterful photographer of three-dimensional works of art, Kennedy became fascinated with the potential of 3-D photography to facilitate the study of sculpture. When he met Edwin Land in 1934, he wrote enthusiastically about the young inventor’s “convincing demonstration of the practicability of studying from stereo-projections on a screen” with the use of polarized filters.2 Recognizing a shared enthusiasm for innovative uses of photography, Land invited Kennedy to serve as one of the company’s early consultants.3 “This business relationship grew into a warm friendship and set the stage for what became a model, the long-term collaboration between artist and industry,” writes Barbara Hitchcock, former director of cultural affairs at Polaroid and curator of the Polaroid Collection.4

With the onset of World War II, Polaroid’s contracts with the U.S. military focused on the production of polarizing filters in gunsights, binoculars, periscopes, rangefinders, and goggles. In 1945, net sales reached $16 million, and the number of company employees grew to over 1,000.5 At the end of the war, the company’s military contracts began to shrink. By 1947, net sales dropped to $1,503,608, the company posted a net loss of $954,410, and employee numbers hovered around 300.6 “With the falling-off of military income, we have reduced the number of our employees substantially, preserving the essential effectiveness of the organization as far as possible,” Land wrote.7 While Polaroid continued to produce polarized materials, Land was counting on a new initiative to reenergize and propel the company’s growth in peacetime.8

Land conceived of instant photography in 1943. While on vacation with his family in Santa Fe, New Mexico, his young daughter Jennifer asked why she could not see a photograph he had just taken of her. “Within an hour, the camera, the film, and the physical chemistry became so clear to me,” Land recounted.9 Polaroid would commercially launch Land’s invention five years later. The company’s experience in research and development, patents, management, mass production, and marketing made it well poised to take on what became known as the SX-70 project (SX meaning “special experiment”).10

“What we have learned at Polaroid,” Land said, “is the homogeneity and the continuum between science and art and art and science. . . . In this marvelous field of photography, we are able to combine that natural association of competences.”11 In the research and development of his revolutionary photographic system, Land drew on the insights of an interdisciplinary community of Polaroid employees and consultants, including Clarence Kennedy. Kennedy schooled his students at Smith on the importance of understanding the visual rendition of a scene. From Kennedy, Land too came to appreciate visual perception as being just as significant as the knowledge of chemistry to innovation in the laboratory. While Land hired individuals trained in physics, chemistry, and optics, he also valued those with humanities backgrounds and began to recruit Kennedy’s students to work at Polaroid.

Eudoxia Muller (later Eudoxia Woodward), a Smith art history graduate, accepted a research position at Polaroid in 1941. Her first assignment involved Vectographs: 3-D images used in aerial reconnaissance during the war. A Polaroid Vectograph consists of a single photograph with two superimposed stereo images (one for the left eye and one for the right) of a 3-D scene.12 Viewing Vectograph prints and transparencies with polarizing glasses recreates the depth of the original scene. At Smith, Muller had helped Kennedy in his research on Vectographs, and she wrote her senior thesis on the process. The dye-transfer techniques used to make Vectographs, which employed a pair of rollers to transfer a dye image from a donor sheet to the Vectograph sheet, would figure in the creation of instant photography.

Muller, credited by Land as his first assistant in instant photography, next began work on the SX-70 project, using a laboratory space Land designated for her research in an unassuming brick building in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Later Eudoxia Muller Woodward remembered, “A phone call [in December 1943] to my little lab. Do the following experiment. I obtained a positive image. From 5 flights up Land flew down the stairs. Delighted with the rather pale brown image. . . . Observing the result, Land transmitted such enthusiasm that it was contagious.”13 When Meroë Morse started at Polaroid in the summer of 1945, she also worked on Vectographs. That fall she joined Muller and the SX-70 team.

Meroë Marston Phelps Morse was born in 1923 in Waterville, Maine, to Céleste Phelps and Harold Calvin Marston Morse.14 She may have inherited her scientific abilities from her father, a mathematician who worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and her artistic talents from family members who introduced her to art and music.15 Classmates at Smith recalled Morse spending hours painting and practicing the harp and observed that Morse’s “gentle cheerfulness, self-assurance, and sense of direction were qualities which must have furthered her career at Polaroid.”16

As an art history major at Smith, Morse had access to the collections of the college art museum, and she could choose from a variety of historical and technical courses, including one taught by Kennedy on photographing works of art. She also experienced the guidance and strong presence of women professors, who made up nearly 40 percent of the faculty.17

When Morse began her career at Polaroid in the mid-1940s, the numbers of women who held jobs in industry had decreased dramatically as men returning from the war reclaimed their positions in the workforce. Richard Kriebel, director of public relations at Polaroid and secretary of the company, helped establish progressive policies to hire women and people of color. To all employees, the corporation provided opportunities for professional career advancement. It also offered a generous benefits package that included support for continuing education programs at the company or at nearby schools and universities, and it instituted personnel policies that supported working mothers.18 Women came to hold positions in all levels of photographic research. “Land had much compassion, respect for others, for a common effort, for the betterment of mankind,” Eudoxia Muller Woodward observed. “Land had faith in the inborn ability of the individual. . . . Employees from the simplest backgrounds were given the chance and much responsibility. He believed in people.”19