Polaroid, created by Edwin Land, is a company as well as many cameras. The company started in 1937 and combined polarizers with every product the company could get its hands on. Polaroid’s first camera did not actually come out until late 1948, 11 years after the company was founded. Edwin Land’s three year old daughter gave him the idea of instant photography when she asked him why she can’t see the picture he had just taken of her. With their invention of instant photography, Polaroid was making photography more accessible to everyone; there was no need to use a darkroom to create a photo if your camera could do it for you.
In the camera there is a roll of positive and negative paper. When the shutter of the camera opens the image develops on the negative paper. After the image is fully developed, the knob near the bottom of the camera is turned which forces the negative and positive paper to come together and crush a packet of chemicals and spread the chemicals evenly across both layers of paper which helps the photo develop even more. The paper is then pushed out of the camera and is cut away from the rest of film with a paper cutter attached to the camera. After a minute or two the photo is ready and the papers can be peeled apart revealing a positive image and a negative one.
Many companies such as Kodak copied or at least tried to copy Polaroid’s invention of instant photography. However, Polaroid would not stand by and let this happen and sued Kodak for copying their ideas. It took many years but eventually Polaroid won the case and around 900 million dollars.
When instant photography sales started to decline due to new technologies at a lower price such as digital cameras and one hour colour film processing, Polaroid began to fall along side it. The company hit bankruptcy in 2001 but continued to try to bring themselves back to the top. These efforts did not work and Polaroid eventually shut down due to bankruptcy in 2008, but a group of former employees bought a factory in the Netherlands and tried to revive Polaroid in the same year with the new name of the Impossible Project, now known as Polaroid Originals.
https://www.boston.com/uncategorized/noprimarytagmatch/2012/10/03/history-of-polaroid-and-edwin-land
https://www.polaroid.com/history
Polaroid introduces the instant camera, February 21, 1947
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