The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 1947–1963
Polaroid put the darkroom inside the film pack
In 1947 Edwin Land's camera squeezed a pod of chemicals between negative and paper to print in a minute.
Polaroid
the move
Before instant photography, a snapshot could take between thirty minutes and two hours to develop, and if an image turned out badly the subject was often gone. The frustration was acute enough that Edwin Land's young daughter, at the beach, simply did not understand why she could not see the picture her father had just taken of her.
Land's answer was to move the whole process inside the camera. The film pack holds a negative, a sheet of positive paper and a small sealed pod of developer. As the exposed negative and the positive paper are pulled through a pair of rollers, the rollers crush the pod, and the developer is spread in a thin layer between them.
The exposed silver image transfers to the positive paper, so after about a minute the negative is peeled away to reveal the photograph. The camera sold out on its first day, made $5 million in its first year, and at Polaroid's peak a billion shots a year were being snapped.
why it works
- Rollers crush the chemical pod right at the moment of exposure, so development is automatic.
- The developer diffuses the silver from the negative to the positive paper, forming the print inside the pack.
- A minute's wait replaces a two-hour darkroom trip, so the picture matches the moment.
what transfers
When a product's cost is a slow, separate step the user cannot see, don't shorten that step — move it into the moment the user acts, so the result is ready when the moment is still fresh.
what came after
Polaroid's Land Camera became the standard for instant photography and the brand was so strong that people called any instant photo a Polaroid; instant color film arrived in 1963, and the company dominated the field for decades before digital cameras displaced the underlying chemistry.
references
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