Sixty years ago this month, 400 OSA members and guests were the first to see a completely new kind of photography. At the Society’s winter meeting at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York, the informal Friday evening dinner was capped off by Edwin H. Land’s demonstration of his new method for making a contact positive print inside the camera itself. Land’s talk was the “most exciting part of the program,” O.S. Duffendack wrote in the meeting proceedings in the Journal of the Optical Society of America (JOSA). Land, president of the Polaroid Corp., also published the details of this “one-step photographic process” in the February 1947 issue of JOSA, complete with a halftone replica of a one-step photo of Lehman Hall at Harvard University. Nineteen months later, the first Polaroid Land camera, the Model 95, went on sale for $89.75 at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston. George Harrison, 1945-1946 OSA president, wrote a firsthand account of Land's famous demonstration; it appears in this month's History of OSA column.
[ Patricia Daukantas is the senior writer/editor of Optics & Photonics News. ]
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The 60th anniversary of Land's instant photography demonstration.
Publish Date: 01 February 2007
