In public appearances spanning half a century, Edwin Land spoke an autobiography, disjointed and selective, but revealing. Over and over, he talked about his obsessions: autonomy, learning, education, vision, perception, the mind, and the mining of exhausted veins of knowledge for new gold. His onstage comments, particularly about education, interpreted his own experience. Nowhere did Land make such a gloss on his past more forcefully than in May 1957, at a sunny noontime of achievement, wealth, and influence.

    Land was not yet fifty, but his system of instant photography, unveiled ten years before, was finding an ever-expanding market. His shares in Polaroid Corporation, which had developed and completely controlled the new field, were soaring in value toward the hundreds of millions of dollars. His astonishing new observations of human color vision were beginning to attract interest and controversy. The still-secret U-2 spy-plane system that Land had spurred was delivering clear-cut evidence of the real state of Soviet military power.

    In the Little Theater of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), on Wednesday evening, 22 May, Land joyfully entered into combat about the right form of college experience. He was certain that a cut-and-dried education spent too much time on blackboard problems and on the past. Students did not spend enough time on the urgent problems of the present, where the answers were not known, where experiments were required. By asking questions and performing experiments, the students could strive for the original contributions of effective and fulfilled people. Although MIT was courting Land's patronage, he attacked its system of education. He also attacked the growing view that science was a socially determined, collective enterprise.

    The talk at MIT trod the thin line between useful advice and the statement of impossible ideals, between experience that was transferable and experience that was unique. For many years, people wondered if "Din" Land's life and mind were so unusual that they might not be exemplary. Just after Land died in 1991, a former president of MIT, Jerome B. Wiesner, exclaimed to a small group of friends planning a memorial symposium, "Din never had an ordinary reaction to anything!"

    It was a springtime of honors for Land. On the afternoon of 13 June, under the trees of Harvard's Tercentenary Theater, Land received an honorary doctorate of science from Harvard University, alongside such dignitaries as the Secretary-General of the United Nations and Robert Woodward, the Harvard chemist who had completed his total synthesis of quinine in 1944 with Land's support. Land was seated a few minutes' walk from the attic laboratory where he had worked as a youth on the sheet polarizer, his first great invention. He was not a speaker at this ceremony.

    During his address three weeks earlier at MIT, where Land had been appointed a Visiting Institute Professor the year before, his manner riveted attention on him. A striking profile was set off by thick black hair, parted on the right. Dark eyes projected intensity. The musing quality of his talk indicated an inner conversation, as if he were searching for the right words for the jury of people in front of him, sometimes trying a half sentence and then substituting a complete one. The audience had a sense of watching Land on a high wire, of participating with him in a half-understood personal drama.

For more than two weeks in April and May, Land had acted as a one-man visiting committee to MIT, just a few blocks away from his red-brick rabbit warren of a laboratory, in what had been the old Kaplan Furniture building on Osborn Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had met with groups of faculty and students, talking about an MIT education. What worked? What didn't work? Land's report to MIT's leaders was delivered in an intimate auditorium in the basement of Eero Saarinen's Kresge Auditorium. The 220-seat room was not quite full, according to one witness. Land's report stung at least some who heard him. Ten years later, this speech, "Generation of Greatness," helped energize the establishment of MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, or UROP, a means of giving more than 80 percent of MIT undergraduates a direct experience of research. Forty years later, an MIT President said that UROP, embodying Land's hope of greatness, not just for the few but for the many, was "still one of the strongest features of an MIT education." Even more important than Land's influence on MIT, wrote Charles M. Vest, was "a vision of greatness and boldness of spirit that were embraced by others."

    The texts of this and other speeches are valuable because Land kept no diary and left few personal letters. After his death on 1 March 1991, a laboratory associate spent three years shredding his papers, presumably because Land had left instructions to do so. In his speeches Land was showing aspects of his character that he did not mind people knowing. Of course, some references were obscure and went right by his audience. Three years after his MIT speech, he told a meeting of Polaroid employees, "One of the best ways to keep a great secret is to shout it."

    On this particular evening, had there been music, it should have been Beethoven. Land displayed an outsized character from a vanished time, at the boundary between rationalism and romanticism, a character who charmed, challenged, exasperated, and controlled many people.

    Drawing from his life, Land said that education must produce people who, no matter how tightly they conformed to the innumerable commands of society, would find one domain where they would make a revolution. Students should go as rapidly as possible through all the intellectual accumulations of the past to reach quickly the domain where they would have their own work to do. Lectures must be streamlined. Why not use movies to "can" a professor's best lectures "with the vitamins in"? The professors would be captured "at the moment when they are most excited about a new way of saying something or at the moment when they have just found something new." They would waste less time redoing their lectures. With the movies, students could view the lectures as many times as they needed. The proposal looked visionary in the 1950s, but Land soon launched his colleague Stewart Wilson on interactive lectures using such films. Forty years later, in an era of computer keyboards and screens, interactive instruction became much simpler.

    Land showed three examples of such movies. One was a fragment of a lecture on the scattering of light; the second discussed how to minimize certain effects on the transmission of signals; the third was a lecture-demonstration on the pressure that light exerts when it acts as particles. This last film was part of the major effort by the Physical Sciences Study Committee, led by MIT physicist Jerrold Zacharias, to develop a new national high school physics course. In some respects, Land argued, the movies were better than an actual lecture. For one thing, the student could see close-ups of the demonstrations. For another, he said, the movies could reduce the emotional reaction, bad or good, to the lecturer. "Either one is too sensitive to the teacher or one is too insensitive; either one is too wide awake or one is too sleepy."

    A second proposal raised hackles. Each arriving student should have an academic "usher," who would promptly set that student on a research project. Land asserted that the ushers would come from the ranks of great scientists who had arrived at the stage in their careers where bringing the young along was as satisfying as making their own scientific contributions.

    Nari Malani, a student who heard him, was impressed:

    Land was very excited. He wasn't smooth and clear-cut, but slow, pausing, careful, logical with beautiful tangents and humorous model anecdotes, thus illustrating his ideas in a thoroughly human way. He has found order and organization in a chaotic world. He wants every freshman to have the same chance ... His vision was dear. He has seen the new horizons.

    An MIT education, Land feared, was fundamentally discouraging. A student would get a message that a "secret dream of greatness is a pipe-dream; that it will be a long time before he makes a significant contribution--if ever." This process was a disaster. He asked with passion, "If this is preparation for life, where in the world [will a person ever encounter] this curious sequence of prepared talks and prepared questions, questions to which the answers are known?"

    He was talking directly from his own experience. When he had arrived as a freshman at Harvard in the fall of 1926, he had encountered a lot of nice young men who didn't know the connection of anything to anything and who would spend the next ten years reading what he had already read. He wanted to get going on some research that would matter. He wanted to get going on what he thought of as greatness.

    To his MIT audience, Land said, "Either you believe that this kind of individual greatness does exist and can be nurtured and developed, that such great individuals can be part of a cooperative community while they continue to be their happy, flourishing, contributing selves--or else you believe that there is some mystical, cyclical, overriding, predetermined cultural law--a historic determinism."

    "The great contribution of science," according to Land, was to demonstrate that historic determinism is "nonsense." A scientist thinks, "I do not understand the divine source, but I know, in a way I cannot understand, that out of chaos I can make order, out of loneliness I can make friendship, out of ugliness I can make beauty."

    The students he met hoped for greatness. "Everywhere I could sense a deep feeling in the undergraduates ... [N]one of them dared express it, but every one of them felt, in his head, that if a way could be found of nurturing the timid dream of his own potential greatness which he brought from his family and school ... Each of these men felt secretly--it was his very special secret and his deepest secret--that he could be great."

    Greatness, Land argued, is "a wonderful and special way of solving problems," which allows a worker in a field to "add things that would not have been added, had he not come along." He said this is not the same as genius, which consists of "ideas that shorten the solution of problems by hundreds of years," or of suddenly saying, as Einstein did, "Mass is energy."

    [N]ot many undergraduates come through our present educational system retaining [the hope of greatness]. Our young people, for the most part--unless they are geniuses--after a very short time in college give up any hope of being individually great. They plan, instead, to be good. They plan to be effective. They plan to do their job. They plan to take their healthy place in the community. We might say that today it takes a genius to come out great; and a great man, a merely great man, cannot survive.

    It has become our habit, therefore, to think that the age of greatness has passed, that the age of the great man is gone; that this is the day of group research; that this is the day of community progress. Yet the very essence of democracy is the absolute faith that while people must cooperate, the first function of democracy, its peculiar gift, is to develop each individual into everything that he might be. But I submit to you that when in each man the dream of personal greatness dies, democracy loses the real source of its future strength.

    When Land spoke, the word "democracy" had domestic and international implications. That year, school desegregation was beginning in response to the U.S. Supreme Court decisions of 1954 and 1955. The American political system also was threatened with a potentially deadly military confrontation with the totalitarian Soviet state. For those in the know, the concern with deterring a Russian attack underlined the urgency of the overhead reconnaissance that involved both Land and MIT's president, James Killian, who was in the audience.

    Land did not agree that tutelage should last longer in a civilization as complex as that of the Age of Science. "Does it not mean, perhaps, the opposite; that we must skillfully make them mature sooner; that we must find ways of handling the intricacy of our culture?" As professors in his audience grumbled audibly, he poured scorn on the constant testing and grading. "When the professor says, `Hand back what I said,' the professor is telling the student that what he, the professor, said is true. Now the role of science is to be systematic, to be accurate, to be orderly; but it certainly is not to imply that the aggregated, successful hypotheses of the past have the kind of truth that goes into a number system."

    MIT teachers, doing intensely competitive research at the frontiers of their fields, surely would deny that students were ready to make an original contribution. Land countered with an example drawn from an exciting field of that day. The German zoologist Karl von Frisch had recently discovered that bees navigated with the help of the polarization of light in the sky and that they used this navigational information to instruct other bees--by dances--on the whereabouts of good sources of nectar. Land had contributed some of his polarizing filters to von Frisch's research. Land now suggested that students could be encouraged to ask what the analyzer was for polarized light in the bee's eye, or to study bee "language" in greater detail than von Frisch had yet done: "[T]here are areas where untrained people may work effectively and with limited equipment."

    Such use of untrained observers was an old story to Land. At Polaroid, many workers who came from humanistic studies in college or from the factory did useful research in the laboratory. A few years later, Land told an audience at Columbia University, where he had worked secretly at night as a youth, "We have not found anti-intellectualism to be a problem at the Polaroid Corporation, except in the very initial stage of penetration. It only takes a day to change someone from an anti-intellectual to an intellectual by persuading him that he might be one!"

    Land's strictures differed greatly from previous Arthur D. Little lectures given by Edward Appleton and Henry Tizard from England, the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, and the psychologist William C. Menninger. The organizing committee had been gunning for Jean Monnet, the French economist who was the architect of what became the European Community, but suspected that he would turn them down, as he evidently did. As a second choice, MIT turned to Land.

    One of those invited to hear the lecture but unable to attend was James B. Fisk, executive vice president and later president of Bell Telephone Laboratories. Fisk was much involved in MIT affairs. In April, he had talked with Land about Land's plans for the MIT lecture. Fisk wrote Killian, "As usual, they are very stimulating and I expect the results will be provocative and profitable."

    Land knew that his remarks had been provocative. Years later, he recalled with rueful pride that some people wouldn't speak to him for days after the lecture. Three days after his address, he sent a handwritten note to Killian to smooth ruffled sensitivities but also to repeat his insistence on change. Thanking Killian for "the privilege of my association with MIT," he denied that he had found MIT lacking. "In fact, I found leadership which has not only proved itself brilliantly already, but which is searching determinedly for the correct next steps." Although MIT felt "peculiarly responsible" for the knowledge inherited from the past, the administration was "courageous enough to examine tradition, and to take from it what is now required, and to add to it what is now needed." He felt strongly that MIT "has the leaders who can abruptly advance education by a generation." Had he not felt that, "I might have been more light-hearted in my presentation." The letter was signed "Din," the nickname he had acquired in childhood, when the name Edwin was still difficult for his older sister, Helen, to pronounce.

    MIT asked Land back. He gave the commencement address in 1960 and spoke at a student-organized Junior Science Symposium in April 1963. On that occasion, he summarized the experiments of Stephen Benton, an MIT student working with him, on the perception of depth and distance. Benton later went to Polaroid and made innovations in holography, which continued after he joined MIT's Media Laboratory. The young man was one of several college students whom Land attracted into his laboratory around this time. The most notable of these was John McCann from Harvard. He collaborated with Land for twenty years on such projects as color-vision research, the development of full-scale photographic replicas of museum paintings, and the organization of increasingly elaborate annual shareholders' meetings.

    Introducing Land in 1963, MIT President Julius Stratton, who had succeeded Killian, referred back to Land's "remarkable" lecture of six years before. Stratton summarized it as having urged that "we draw each incoming student, at the earliest possible moment, into a research project of his own to develop, to instill the scientific experience, to make him feel that he is a part of this and to grow with it and to develop these powers of the imagination; and expressed his deep belief [in] what one can do, even at the earliest stages of a career." The 1957 lecture had influenced MIT to set up its Freshman Seminars, in which more than six hundred students took part in 1962-63. The seminars continue in the 1990s.

    Land followed up on his comments of 1957. A scientist, he said, does not ask, "Why do I believe what I believe?" but rather, "Why do I want to believe what I believe?" He added, "Science, to put it somewhat vulgarly, is a technique to keep yourself from kidding yourself." He told them to get going at once. "The only safe procedure for you, now that you have started, is to make sure that from this day forward until the day you are buried, you do two things each day. First, master a difficult old insight, and, second, add some new piece of knowledge to the world each day. Now does that seem extravagant?"

    Back in 1957, Killian had thought over Land's suggestions. He had liked the ideas about starting students immediately on research projects and capturing important lectures on film. On the other hand, he had disagreed with Land's objections to grading and Land's concept of the ushers. Students had been conditioned by previous schooling and would become "restive and impatient" without grades to tell them where they stood. The ushers, Killian thought, would soon become second-class citizens in a research-centered university.

    "Dr. Land has an innovating, creative mind," Killian wrote in a memorandum he never published. "The great value of Dr. Land's fresh view of education is its insistence on the importance of a new approach and his great emphasis on a re-awakened concern with the student as an aspiring individual."