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A BLURRY PORTRAIT OF A FLAWED GENIUS
INSISTING ON THE IMPOSSIBLE Coming on strong, however, is Jerome H. Lemelson, inventor of the technology that led to bar-code readers, among other things. He had 510 patents when he died a year ago. But Lemelson has a further 75 applications pending--with more to come. The notebooks that Lemelson left are such a treasure trove that Lemelson's patent attorney, Gerald D. Hosier, has found a couple dozen further inventions that he may try to patent on behalf of the Lemelson Foundation. By contrast, after Edwin Land's death in 1991, nobody was able to mine his notebooks: All of his personal papers were systematically destroyed. This was probably done on the inventor's instructions, according to Victor K. McElheny's Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land. But if Land ultimately slips to No. 4 in the patent Hall of Fame, his fans can always boast that Land, like Edison, turned his ideas into real-life products that spawned thousands of jobs, built a major company--Polaroid Corp. (PRD)--and affected the lives of countless people around the world. Lemelson, on the other hand, was a ''paper inventor'' who rarely bothered to build even models of his inventions. In addition to the shredding of all of Land's papers, McElheny's handicaps include the fact that Land wrote few letters and stood rather aloof from his family after founding Polaroid in 1937, at age 28. Perhaps to make up for the uncertainties and mysteries that surround Land's private life--even his place of birth is uncertain--the book offers many snapshots of contemporaneous technological and cultural currents. For example, after reporting that Land's passion for research on intractable problems was matched by other pioneers of science-based industry, we're given almost a page on GE's work to find a better lightbulb filament. Interesting to some, no doubt, but the digression does little to illuminate Land's character. As the book's title suggests, the knottiest problems held the strongest attraction for Land. His guideline was: ''Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.'' We yearn to know more about what shaped this remarkable determination. After all, here was a young man so confident of attaining his place in history that he dropped out of Harvard University midway through his freshman year. He felt it was his mission to make the roads safer by developing a polarized filter that would reduce the nighttime glare of car headlights. After many trips to the New York Public Library and 8- to 10-hour marathons of poring over scientific papers on optics and polarized light, he launched a series of experiments that culminated, after just a year, in a method for making polarized glass. That was the basis for Land's first patent, filed in 1929 and granted in 1933. Licensing fees from it laid the foundation for Polaroid Corp. And this youthful entrepreneur by no means had a free run at polarized glass. There was stiff competition, including Westinghouse Electric Corp. and a small but tenacious New Jersey company, Polarized Lights. They fought Land tooth and nail. But Land prevailed. The idea for instant photography popped outof the blue in 1943, while Land was vacationing in Santa Fe, N.M. After he took a snapshot of his 3-year-old daughter, she asked to see the picture on the spot. Land pondered what that would require. An hour later, he had a comprehensive mental image of a camera that could develop and print its own pictures. Turning his afternoon brainstorm into the first commercial Polaroid camera, however, would take five years of painstaking engineering. All this and more is recounted in minute detail, as you would expect from a book of more than 500 pages. Chapters on Land's later career hold few surprises for businessfolk familiar with his shortcomings as a manager--he held marketing in disdain, for one thing--and the events leading to his fall from grace and resignation in 1982. But McElheny, a longtime science reporter at the New York Times, does make some fascinating revelations. For example, Land played a key, behind-the-scenes role in developing the photographic systems used by the U-2 spy plane and reconnaissance satellites. And he secretly made multimillion-dollar contributions to Harvard and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Yet what emerges is more a history of things and ideas--and less a satisfying portrait of Land as a human being. Given the handicap imposed by Land on any biographer, that's understandable. But McElheny's attempts tO shed light tangentially on Land's personality often result in turgid diversions and annoying jumps in time. Still, the book is well worth reading for its myriad insights into the process of innovation. Land will be forever remembered as the man who gave the world a new way to take photos. But the picture we have of him may forever be out of focus.
BY OTIS PORT RELATED ITEMS
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Updated Nov. 5, 1998 by bwwebmaster
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