On November 26, 1948, the first “Land Camera”—better known today as the instant Polaroid camera—goes on sale at Jordan Marsh department store in Boston for $89.75. The invention of Edwin H. Land, who had enrolled at Harvard to study physics in 1926, but dropped out to conduct his own research, becomes an instant hit and sells out within minutes that first day.
The camera, dubbed Model 95A, debuted the technology of instant photography decades before modern digital photos. These cameras would shoot out a piece of lined film that quickly developed the image the camera captured. The Polaroid camera remained popular for the rest of the 20th century and competed with Kodak, which developed film the more time-consuming and old-fashioned way with chemicals, a dark room and printing.
Land’s daughter, Jennifer, was the muse that led to his invention of instant photography. In 1943, while walking together, the 3-year-old girl asked her father why she couldn’t see the picture he had just taken of her. That gave Land—co-founder of Land-Wheelwright Laboratories, later called Polaroid Corporation, in Cambridge, Massachusetts—an idea: Why not invent a camera that produces photos much more quickly? He figured out a way to develop both the negative and positive image in one minute and produce a dry, stabilized print. At a time when consumers typically waited days for photos to be developed professionally, the ability to see photos develop right before their eyes, from their own cameras, proved mesmerizing.
Less than a decade after its 1948 debut, the millionth Model 95A came off the production line, having revolutionized photography. In 1963, Polaroid’s business expanded significantly when the company introduced its color film, after 15 years of sepia and then black-and-white prints. But as digital photography technology emerged at the dawn of the new millennium, Polaroid struggled to keep up; it shuttered in 2008.
In 2017, Austrian entrepreneur Florian Kaps started The Impossible Project to save the Polaroid and its analog technology. Now, retro-style Polaroid cameras are made and sold today, for people who love the nostalgic feel of instant-yet-still-physical photography that pre-dates the internet and cell phone era.
