Polaroid's Big Gamble on Small Cameras
WHEN President Nixon travels abroad, what do members of his official entourage do in their spare time? They take amateur pictures of the memorable sights. At the Great Wall of China, Nixon's personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, happily snapped away like any ordinary tourist. In Warsaw, Presidential Aide H.R. Haldeman leaned out of a moving car to take pictures of a friendly crowd--and he was banged up when the vehicle suddenly lurched to a stop. Whether abroad or at home, Americans are in the midst of a photo binge, taking more and more amateur pictures of people, places and things.
The new popularity is transforming photography from mere hobby to a natural, even essential way of looking at the world and capturing life as it is. Photo galleries, many selling the work of professionals at $25 per print and up, have opened by the dozen in large cities. The craft has found some of its most devoted followers among the young, who increasingly strive to document their own new lifestyles and find photography, with its blending of technology and aesthetics, an honest way to do so. As a part of this view-finding process, photography has become one of the fastest growing subjects in education: photography courses are offered at some 700 universities, junior colleges and adult education centers. Tens of thousands of Viet Nam vets have become serious about photography after buying expensive 35-mm. cameras at big discounts in the Far East. At rock concerts and in youth hangouts from Central Park's Bethesda Fountain to California's Santa Monica beach, there are almost as many camera straps as headbands in evidence.
Some 42 million Americans, or about one in five, are photographers of one sort or another. Amateurs snap away at an astonishing rate, taking more than 5 billion pictures annually, or about 158 each second, night and day, all year long. Their purchases of film, cameras, flashbulbs and processing services are the backbone of a more than $4 billion-a-year industry. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that photography will be the second-or thirdfastest growing industry in the economy during the 1970s, rising an average 8% or 9% a year.
The public's interest in photography has always leaped highest whenever new cameras, making picture-taking even simpler and more reliable, have reached the market. This year, for the first time in nearly a decade, cameras and films for amateurs are undergoing a revolutionary change. The new American cameras are not only easy to operate but, more important, easy to carry. They are so compact, compared with their predecessors, that they can be toted in pocket or purse, more like a wallet or a pack of cigarettes than a piece of hand luggage. The era of pocket photography is here, and it promises to make the camera a spectacularly more usable possession. If leaders of the photo industry are right, many consumers will want to carry one around nearly everywhere, having it ready to employ as a kind of visual notepad.
The small-camera sweepstakes began three months ago when Kodak introduced its five-model line of pocket
Instamatics, priced from about $28 to $128 and weighing from 5.6 oz. to 9 oz. Only one inch thick and capable of being tucked into a shirt pocket, they produce remarkably true color prints that are one-third again as large as those processed from the old-style Instamatics, which were more than three times bulkier. The more expensive models automatically control exposure and tell photographers when to use a flash cube. Next week Kodak will turn out the one-millionth new pocket camera, and company chiefs hope to sell 4,000,000 during the first year. So far, they cannot keep up with demand, and there are waiting lists for Instamatics at many stores.
The most startling--and certainly the costliest--of the new generation of cameras is a box of magic from Polaroid, the developer of instant photography. Like all previous Polaroid Land cameras, the compact new camera will almost certainly bear the name of its inventor, Edwin Herbert Land, the founder, president, chairman and research director of Polaroid. Dark-eyed and quite youthful for his 63 years, Land looks every inch the scientific genius. A paradoxical person, he alternates between lives as laboratory recluse and businessman-philosopher. He can be intensely shy and awkwardly unsure in face-to-face conversation. Yet he is capable of spellbinding audiences with glimpses into new scientific frontiers. Land is revered by his employees, stockholders and even his competitors to a greater degree than almost any other corporate chief in the U.S. He so greatly personifies his company that top executives at competing Kodak nearly always refer to the Polaroid Corp. as "he" or "him." Says Kodak Vice President Van Phillips: "Someday Edwin Land will be ranked with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell." He quickly adds: "And George Eastman" (the Kodak founder).
For the past seven years Land has devoted his life to his new camera. He made the daring gamble of sinking nearly a quarter-billion dollars of Polaroid's money into its development, constructing huge plants before he knew whether the camera would work, or even how it would look. Yet with characteristic disregard for details--sometimes crucial ones--he still has not settled on a model name for the small Polaroid Land camera, which is scheduled to reach dealers' shelves in limited numbers late this fall. Around Polaroid headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., the camera is referred to by its project designation, SX-70, and the film for it already rolling off the assembly lines is being packaged in blank boxes, which will be imprinted when Land finally makes up his mind. The camera is just the first of what eventually will be a whole family of pocket Polaroids.
The SX-70 will sell for at least $ 100 and perhaps for as much as $175. (For fear of completely halting sales on its higher-priced current models, Polaroid refuses to disclose the exact price of its new one.) Can the mass market possibly bear that price? Land answers extravagantly: "I think this camera can have the same impact as the telephone on the way people live." Polaroid salesmen are so sure of the SX-70's appeal that they speak of rationing it among dealers and predict that every unit produced in the first twelve months--perhaps 1,000,000 or more--will sell instantly. Reason: the new camera eliminates just about all the bugs that have annoyed Polaroid owners, including Land, for the past 24 years.
Garbage-Free. When folded, the SX-70 is about half the size of many old models, small enough (about 11/10 in. by 4 1/5 in. by 7 in.) to fit into the breast pocket of a man's jacket. It weighs 26 oz. and is completely automatic, even to film advancement, which has had to be done manually (and sometimes faultily) in all previous models. The most unreal thing about the SX-70 is its film, which will cost no more than current Polaroid color film (about 45-c- per picture). Flicking out of the camera only 1.2 sec. after exposure, the pictures at first are a mass of opaque blue-gray, then slowly develop within four minutes in full view of the photographer. Sheathed in unscratchable plastic and backed by a thin coating of titanium, they are dry to the touch even while developing, in welcome contrast to the sticky prints and paper wrappers that have always before been part of Polaroid photography. There are no chemical-laden negatives to throw away; this is a "garbage-free" process. Finally, the new film produces brilliant color. Not everyone agrees with Land that the SX-70 is "a wholly new medium," but industry leaders are unanimous that it is a stunning technological achievement.
Rarely in U.S. business history has any company tampered so drastically with a product that is already so successful. Since introducing its first "snap it, see it" cameras in Boston's Jordan Marsh department store in 1948, Polaroid has marketed some 26 million of them; today it sells more cameras in the $50-and-over class than all other companies in the world combined. However, sales really began to take off when the company broke the cost barrier on earlier models and produced Polaroids that retailed at discount for as little as $ 15. Since 1961, revenues have risen by 400%, to last year's $504 million, making Polaroid one of the fastest growing companies of modern times.
As a result, Polaroid stock is one of the favorite glamour issues on Wall Street. Anyone who invested $1,000 in the company in 1938 today has stock worth $3,575,000. Indeed, an investment of $1,000 in Polaroid ten years ago has grown to at least $4,750. The shares held by Land and his family, who control 15% of the total, are worth about half a billion dollars, probably making him the world's richest scientist.
For all his success, Land was convinced as early as 1963 that if Polaroid owners could get a small, easily portable, nonmessy instant-picture camera, they would buy huge numbers of them --and far more of Polaroid's high-profit film than they now do. Thus, Land undertook the greatest camera quest of his career: development of the SX-70. "The program to create our new camera was like a siren," he says. "She never came clean to say whether she meant to succeed or not, but she never let us escape."
The effort was divided into separate projects for film and camera, and Land plunged into both, often disappearing for weeks at a time to work 18-hour days in his laboratory. His constant shuffling between projects unnerved some associates. Recalls Assistant Vice President Christopher Ingraham: "When we seemed to be putting all our efforts into camera design, someone would say, 'God damn it, Dr. Land, how about making the film?' And he would reply, 'Oh, that's all taken care of, don't worry about that.' Actually, the film people couldn't believe their ears."
Disappointments littered the way.
Land originally wanted to design a camera that did not have to be unfolded before becoming usable. But after testing several mockups, including one that electronically scanned the picture area, he decided that the negative needed for Polaroid photography was too large for any lens that could not be extended outward simply by a bellows. By the time he returned to the concept of a pop-out model, two years had been lost.
Yet the time was probably gained back by moments of sheer inspiration, scientific and otherwise. While searching for a small but powerful motor to run the new camera, a Polaroid engineer had the unusual insight one afternoon that the motors used to run his son's toy race cars might work. The next day Polaroid researchers invaded a Boston hobby shop and eventually modeled the SX-70 motor on an electric-train engine that they spotted there. While mulling over the complaint of a Polaroid owner, who had phoned all the way from Africa to protest that he could not find a replacement for his used-up battery, Land decided that the power cells that ran the complex mechanism of the SX-70 camera should be put in the film pack rather than inside the instrument itself. Polaroid engineers designed a wafer-thin battery that will be packaged inside every container of SX-70 film. The film is exposed by a tricky system of mirrors, including one that lifts up to reflect the final image (see diagram, page 82).
The most daring concept in the new camera involves the film. Determined not to waste the SX-70 photographer's time by making him wait for pictures to develop inside the camera, Land ordered his chemists to find a way to let the pictures develop outside. His suggestion: find an "opacifier" (from the word opaque) that would cloud the film and block out light rays, while special developing chemicals did their work. A team of 25 chemists worked for four years to produce such an agent. When they brought the first bottle of it to Land's office, he gave them a cake inscribed: "From darkness there shall come light." The film's treated negative, only one three-hundredth of an inch thick, contains no fewer than eight chemical layers, some of them the thickness of a red light wave (about .00002 in.).
If Edwin Land had his way, the sum total of public knowledge about his life would not be much thicker. Extremely wary of publicity, he has held only three press conferences in his career and refuses to speak about himself to all but a few close friends. The son of a merchant, Land was raised near Norwich, Conn., and in 1926 graduated from Norwich Academy with near-perfect marks. His high school physics teacher, Raymond Case, recalls that in his senior year Land "was already working at a level where I couldn't help him." He was also a prize-winning debater and a member of the Norwich track team.
The Polaroid empire was founded on the results of experiments performed by Land as an 18-year-old Harvard student in 1928. He was experimenting with ways to polarize light, a process in which rays in a beam of light are screened out unless they are traveling on a single, straight plane. Among other things, polarized light produces far less glare than diffused light. Scientists have long known that certain calcite crystals can do the job of filtering; Land's accomplishment was in polarizing light with other materials, including polyvinyl alcohol sheets and various forms of iodine. He became so engrossed in his discoveries that he dropped out of school to pursue them and never returned to graduate. Though he is called Dr. Land by almost everyone, his doctoral degrees are all honorary, including one from Harvard.
He continued his research in the New York Public Library, in a rented room on Manhattan's West 55th Street, and in a Columbia University physics lab, which he occasionally got into by climbing through an unlocked window after closing hours. His lab assistant in the early years was his wife, the former Helen ("Terre") Maislen, who subsequently retired to raise the Lands' two daughters, Jennifer and Valerie, both now married. Land has always been extremely close to his family. He and Mrs. Land live quietly in a rambling New England house on Cambridge's Brattle Street, two miles from his office.
It took another nine years for Land to perfect the polarizing process and decide how it could be marketed. As with most of his other projects, Land tried to start big. In 1937 he set up the Polaroid Corp. in a former tobacco wholesaler's building on Boston's Columbus Avenue with the plan of selling Detroit's automakers on the idea of putting his polarizers in the sun visors and headlights of all new cars. Land was convinced that the reduced glare would make night driving much safer. But manufacturers noted that the polarizing sheets deteriorated when exposed to heat, and they showed little interest. Even so, the idea is still not completely dead. In the past few years, experiments with polarized headlights have been sponsored by the U.S. and Canadian governments. Depending on their outcome, the first Land dream might still come true.
Fortunately for both inventor and company, Polaroid managed to market its idea in other forms. Polaroid nonglare sunglasses, introduced in 1937, fared well with consumers, and the company still sells 25 million pairs of lenses annually. Polaroid grew quickly during World War II, producing goggles, glasses and filters, but it sagged after the war ended. In 1947 the company lost $2,000,000; it sorely needed to develop new products. Naturally, Land was ready with an idea.
Expensive Toy. While vacationing in Santa Fe with his family in 1943, Land had his three-year-old daughter Jennifer pose for some pictures on a walk. The child asked how long it would be until she could see them. Land, who had been interested in photography since childhood, immediately began wondering how photos might be developed and printed right inside the camera. He now claims jokingly that by the time he and Jennifer returned from their walk, he had solved all the problems "except for the ones that it has taken from 1943 to 1972 to solve." Actually, he managed to work out enough of the bugs to announce the invention of "instant photography" to an amazed group of optical scientists early in 1947 and to put the first Polaroid Land camera on sale late in 1948. The "Model 95" weighed nearly 4 lbs., produced sepia-toned pictures of varying quality and retailed for $89.75.
The basic developing process in the Model 95 has been greatly refined but remains the same even in Polaroid's new small camera. A negative is exposed, then brought into contact with a positive print sheet, and both are drawn between a pair of rollers. In the process, a small pod of jelly-like chemicals attached to the positive is ruptured and spread across the sheet. Within seconds, the finished picture is ready. The other new feature of the Model 95 was Land's "exposure value system," which reduced the previously complex calculation of shutter speed and lens opening to a simple dial adjustment. Variations of it have since become standard on all but the most inexpensive cameras.
To the astonishment of photography professionals, who had written off the Polaroid as an expensive toy, Model 95 turned out profits almost as fast as it turned out pictures. Sales spurted further ahead each time Land dangled a new improvement before customers, which he did with increasing regularity: black and white film in 1950, 15-sec. pictures and a camera with an automatic exposure system in 1960, color film and film cartridges in 1963, the low-priced Swinger in 1965, and most recently a pair of low-priced color cameras, the Colorpack II in 1969 and the Square Shooter in 1971.
Many of these models were previewed during Land's now-legendary appearances at Polaroid's annual meetings, at which he stages a modern magic-lantern show to demonstrate the company's latest marvels. Several thousand people, including armies of securities analysts and newsmen, attend these affairs. To show off the SX-70 last April, Land set up a dozen displays--ranging from a simulated children's birthday party to a collection of antique miniatures--at which Polaroid employees clicked away with the new cameras.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Polaroid is that it has grown huge by creating products for which there was little detectable demand, until Edwin Land thought of them. Each is, as Land says, sui generis--in a class by itself. That distinction makes conventional market research, in the words of one of his marketing executives, "a waste of time and money." Polaroid did not spend a single dollar trying to discern in advance whether people would actually buy the SX-70.
For Polaroid the SX-70 is a pivotal business development. Following a favorite Land dictum--"Never do what others can do for you"--the company has always before relied heavily on outside contractors to assemble its cameras and large parts of its film packs. For the past several years Polaroid has bought $50 million worth of color negatives from Kodak and then done the rest of the work in turning them into film packs. But in bringing out its new camera, the company has made a major turn-around and converted itself into a big manufacturer, building five plants in the Boston area to produce the entire film package and assemble the camera's major components. Together, the plants are capable of turning out as many high-ticket SX-70s as Polaroid now sells in all price ranges.
Polaroid is still nowhere near self-sufficient. Without even being able to show them a finished mockup, Land persuaded nearly a dozen big corporations--including Corning Glass, Texas Instruments, General Electric and Ray-O-Vac--to make major capital commitments to produce the SX-70's complex, 260-transistor circuit, power cells, lens and flash system. But Polaroid is producing film for the SX-70 from scratch; that move will gradually sever its longstanding, and usually amicable, association with Kodak, as customers switch to the SX-70 and its less expensive successors. As a result, Polaroid stands to cash in even more on film sales, which account for half its revenues and are by far the most profitable part of the photography business. Kodak reportedly collects an 80% pretax profit on the millions of little yellow boxes of film that it sells annually.
Nobody has watched Polaroid's growth with keener interest than the chiefs of Kodak, the Rochester giant built on George Eastman's first "little black box" in 1888. Kodak has undoubtedly lost ground to Polaroid but is still a mammoth company which had sales last year of $3 billion from photo products, synthetic fibers (Kodel) and chemicals.
Eastman's successors are developing many innovative cameras of their own. Besides producing the new pocket Instamatics, which are expected eventually to outnumber the 60-million old-size units in use, Kodak in the last year has scored an important breakthrough in motion-picture photography. It has brought out two new 8-mm. cameras and a high-speed Ektachrome film that enable photographers to shoot movies indoors with no special lighting. In fact, the cameras produce adequate close-in pictures even when the only lighting is the candle power of a lit-up birthday cake. The bother of setting up floodlights has previously been the main drag on sales of movie cameras, which are now used by only 13% of U.S. families.
Even so, Kodak is painfully embarrassed at finding itself so far behind in instant photography. Convinced for years that Polaroid could never find a camera inexpensive enough to tap the mass market, Kodak's chiefs were finally toppled from their complacency by the success of the Polaroid Swinger in the mid-'60s, and they ordered a hurry-up research project into an alternate system of instant photography. Land was no longer simply an ingenious inventor and customer; he was an enlarging and possibly troublesome competitor. Kodak executives were surprised by the high quality of the color prints produced by Land's small new camera.
Kodak reports that it is pouring "very substantial funds" into instant photography. Land says that Kodak researchers still "don't know where they're going" with an instant process. Some stock analysts, however, believe that the company plans to market its own instant film process for use in Polaroid cameras as early as 1973. These experts are convinced that any camera buff--even a Polaroid owner--would automatically have faith in a new yellow-box product. Meanwhile, there is much speculation that Kodak and Polaroid are racing each other to introduce --some time in the next few years--instant slides and instant movie film.
Certainly Kodak is eager to make and market instant-photo cameras, but that will not be easy. Polaroid employs no fewer than 25 patent attorneys, who have erected a blockade of some 1,000 patents around the Polaroid process. Though rights to the original Land inventions in instant photography have long since expired, no would-be competitor has been able to jump ahead of those that are still tightly protected. Thus, to an astonishing degree, Polaroid has no direct competition.
No ID. Polaroid is anything but a conventional corporate giant. It has no long-term debt, because Land is convinced that he should be "financially conservative and technologically audacious." In Cambridge, the company seems to feed on the intellectual and technological ferment of neighboring Harvard and M.I.T.--where Land occasionally teaches courses in specialized sciences--and sometimes on social ferment as well. Soon after the Kent State killings in 1970, Polaroid employees were invited to send any message of their choosing to President Nixon at company expense; some 2,200 did so. Polaroid technicians have gone to extreme lengths to protect the environment, once even rigging a costly twist in pipes leading from a chemical plant in order to save several trees. One of Land's personal embarrassments--until the "garbage-free" SX-70 film was designed--was the amount of litter that his product created.
Land has built Polaroid very close to his own self-image--part scientist and part humanitarian philosopher. The latter side of the corporation's personality is most strongly expressed in its extraordinarily forward-looking community-relations program, which has served as a model for other big corporations. Polaroid now donates money or some other form of assistance to 143 community projects in the Boston area, including day-care centers and tutoring projects. Says Cambridge Mayor Barbara Ackerman, a Democrat and social activist: "Polaroid is the only industry in this city that you can go to for money, for land or for some other contribution to the community. Polaroid considers itself a neighbor and actually does neighborly things."
Polaroid is interested in the world far beyond its immediate neighborhood. The company's community relations director, Robert Palmer, recently spent ten days helping mediate a prisoner revolt at Massachusetts' Walpole state prison, and has condemned as dehumanizing a proposed ID card system for Massachusetts welfare recipients--even though an ID system pioneered by Polaroid might well have been used. This year the company reached a longtime goal of employing one black in each ten jobs, about the same ratio as blacks in the total population.
As a socially conscious corporation, Polaroid is also, as Palmer puts it, "a choice target." In October 1970, a dozen black-militant employees tacked up posters on Polaroid bulletin boards accusing the company of supporting apartheid in South Africa by allowing its cameras and film to be used in internal passports and by paying much lower wages there to blacks than whites. The charges turned out to be embarrassingly accurate. Even though the Polaroid operation in South Africa is owned by an independent distributor rather than by the parent corporation, Land was deeply hurt by the employee protest. He decided on a novel solution: he asked a group of employees, including blacks, to visit South Africa and study the case. "Your decision will be implemented, whatever it is," he promised. The group eventually agreed unanimously to stop selling to the government but to continue other operations in South Africa, while ordering Polaroid's distributor to upgrade black wages.
For the Amateur. In the U.S., Polaroid has upgraded many employees by setting up a unique apprentice system, in which blue-collar workers are assigned to become aides to experienced researchers. "In about two years we find that these people have become almost a Pygmalion problem," says Land. "They have become creative." Indeed, Land believes that almost anything can be accomplished, including the remaking of people. In his drive for breakthroughs, scientific and social, he is always experimenting. While visiting London two years ago, he startled his driver by exclaiming: "Did you know that I am an addict? I am addicted to at least one good experiment a day."
One reason for Polaroid's success is Land's unabashed cultivation of the nonexpert photographer. According to Consultant Augustus Wolfman, who publishes a widely read annual study of the photo industry, some 70% of amateurs' pictures are taken of people, especially babies, relatives and guests at special occasions like birthday parties. Because so many of an amateur's pictures are taken at home or close to home, most of the disadvantages of the current Land cameras--the bulkiness, the throwaway negatives--do not really pose problems. On the other hand, their principal advantage--immediate viewing--is a major asset. Land argues that what the company has to offer its customers is "the realization of an impulse: see it, touch it, have it." Reflecting this, the company's advertisements show informal Polaroid photos of children and family groups. By contrast, Kodak's camera ads emphasize not the subject but the camera itself.
Not everyone is convinced that advances in popular photography bring the medium any closer to realizing its aesthetic potential. Says Peter Bunnell, curator of photography at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art: "Land could invent new cameras every hour and still would not increase the awareness of photography as a creative medium because his cameras are designed for the amateur." Yet few golden ages can occur without first exciting the interest of amateurs, whether as onlookers or as the sources of real artistic talent. Takateru Koakimoto, design chief at Japan's Nikon Inc., recalls that after the original Instamatics were marketed in the mid-'60s, "we began to see so many Americans graduate from their Instamatics and in no time at all switch to our more advanced cameras."
Sales of the sophisticated Japanese cameras are clicking up fast in the U.S. and have wiped out practically all competition from German models. Still, the Japanese marketed only about 1,000,000 cameras in the U.S. last year, capturing under 10% of unit sales. Japanese manufacturers, in fact, refer to the U.S. as a "developing market."
For the foreseeable future, the majority of American amateurs still appear to want a simple, basic instrument for taking pictures, the kind that Kodak and Polaroid have consistently been first to provide. Does that mean that amateur photography will always be a minor craft, an exercise in using ever simpler cameras to take ever more pictures of babies, barbecues and baseball games but little else? Edwin Land does not think so. "Every good picture we take --one that is taken with care--should make our lives that much bigger," he says. "Photography is an illustration of the use of technology not to estrange, but to reveal and unite people."
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