50 Fun Facts About Polaroid

Who founded the Polaroid Corporation in 1937?

Land ran the company as CEO for 43 years and was on the cover of Life in 1972 as 'A Genius and His Magic Camera'.

In which Massachusetts city was Polaroid founded?

Its Streamline Moderne headquarters at 784 Memorial Drive is on the National Register of Historic Places.

What was Polaroid's initial market before instant cameras?

Its polarisers also went into 3-D movies and protective goggles for military dogs.

Which university did Land leave after his freshman year to pursue his polariser research?

He later returned to Harvard to continue his research but never took a degree.

Whose question on a 1943 holiday in Santa Fe inspired the idea of instant photography?

Jennifer Land's question sent her father straight to his patent attorney, who happened to be in town.

In which year did the first Land Camera go on sale to the public?

Land had given the first public demonstration in February 1947.

At which Boston department store was the Land Camera Model 95 first sold?

By 1950 about 4,400 dealers across the United States sold Polaroid products.

What colour were the prints from the original Model 95 Land Camera?

True black-and-white instant film followed in 1950 and colour Polacolor in 1963.

In which year did Polaroid introduce Polacolor, its instant colour film?

Until 1972 users still had to pull a tab and peel the negative from the print.

Which 1972 camera was the first to eject a self-developing print automatically?

It was a folding single-lens reflex, produced until 1981.

What type of camera design was the SX-70?

Land announced it at the company's annual meeting in April 1972.

Which feature did the 1978 Sonar OneStep bring to consumer SLRs for the first time?

It bounced ultrasound off the subject, so it could focus even in the dark.

How much did the Polaroid Swinger cost when launched in 1965?

A catchy Meet the Swinger jingle helped make it one of the best-selling cameras of all time.

Which kind of film did the Swinger use?

Its wallet-size prints were little more than half the size of the standard 40-series roll.

Which chemical component do the rollers break open as instant film leaves the camera?

Diffusion transfer then moves the dyes from the negative to the positive.

Which Polaroid home-movie system of 1977 was called the company's swan song?

It arrived just as videotape systems took off, and the write-off came to $89 million.

Roughly how long did a cartridge of the 1977 instant home-movie system run?

A Betamax or VHS tape ran at least an hour at top quality.

Which company did Polaroid sue in 1976 for copying its instant photography patents?

The federal case lasted ten years.

How much was Kodak ordered to pay Polaroid at the end of the patent suit?

Kodak also had to stop making instant cameras altogether.

In which year did the original Polaroid Corporation first file for bankruptcy?

Its peak revenue had been $3 billion just ten years earlier.

What was Polaroid's peak number of employees, reached in 1978?

The Boston Globe called the company the Apple of its time.

Which term describes the management failure blamed for Polaroid's digital-era collapse?

Ironically Polaroid had made an early digital camera, the PDC-2000, in 1996.

In which year did Polaroid stop making its cameras, before ending film sales after 2009?

Manufacturing had been sold to Flextronics and largely moved to China.

Which pop star was appointed Polaroid's creative director in January 2010?

A PR spokesperson confirmed in 2014 that the partnership had ended.

What was the name of the 2008 venture that saved instant film for old Polaroid cameras?

It bought Polaroid's remaining production machinery for $3.1 million.

In which Dutch town did the last Polaroid film factory stand?

The plant was rebranded under the Polaroid Originals name in 2017.

Who were the three founders of the 2008 film-rescue venture?

Kaps and Bosman met at the closing event of the Enschede factory in June 2008.

Which Polish investor bought the Polaroid brand in 2017?

He was already the largest shareholder in the Impossible Project, persuaded to invest by his son Oskar.

In which year did Polaroid Originals shorten its name back to simply Polaroid?

The Polaroid Now was the first instant camera in years to carry the plain Polaroid name.

Which 2021 model was billed as the world's smallest analog instant camera?

The I-2 of 2023 was its first premium model with manual controls.

How many patents did the founder hold when he retired?

Edison held 1,097 American patents.

Which Cold War aircraft's optics did Land help design?

He also advised Eisenhower and worked on the Corona and Samos photographic satellites.

Which theory of colour vision did Land develop?

The name blends retina and cortex.

In which Connecticut city was the founder born in 1909?

He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1991.

Which honour did Land receive in 1963 for his work in optics?

The National Medal of Technology followed in 1988.

Which research body did Land found in his later years beside the Charles River?

Land was pushed out of Polaroid in the wake of the Polavision failure.

Which crystals were embedded in Land's original 1929 polarising sheet?

The later H-sheet of 1938 used polyvinyl alcohol impregnated with iodine.

Which 1970 employee group pressured the company over apartheid passbook photos?

Caroline Hunter and Ken Williams discovered the passbook link and later married.

Which Polaroid camera line launched in 1986 used a wider rectangular film format?

Captiva and the pocket-sized i-Zone followed in the 1990s.

Which Japanese company's Instax line, launched in 1998, became Polaroid's great rival?

Fujifilm had sold instant cameras in Japan since the Fotorama line of 1981.

Which 3-D print technology did Joseph Mahler develop at Polaroid with Land?

Mahler was a cousin of the composer Gustav Mahler; the prints are viewed through polarised glasses.

Which pop artist used Polaroid snapshots as sketches for his lithographs?

His favourite was the Big Shot, a fixed-focus portrait camera.

Who co-founded Polaroid with Edwin Land in 1937?

The Boston Globe later called the firm 'the Apple of its time', with Land as its founding CEO for four decades.

In which US city was the SX-70 first put on sale in late 1972?

National sales followed in fall 1973; the camera cost $180 and a ten-shot film pack $6.90.

How many photos did Land shoot on stage in ten seconds when unveiling the SX-70 in 1972?

He pulled the folded camera from his suit pocket, a stunt impossible with any earlier Land Camera.

Which $40 camera became the best-selling camera of the 1977 Christmas season?

It used SX-70 film and finally made the integral-film technology a mass-market hit.

What is included inside each Polaroid integral film pack to power the camera?

The 'Polapulse' battery runs exposure, focusing, flash and the ejection motor, so every new pack brings fresh power.

Which magazine put Land on its 1972 cover as 'A Genius and His Magic Camera'?

The cover marked the arrival of the SX-70, the first Polaroid that ejected its prints automatically.

Which early digital camera did Polaroid release in 1996?

Polaroid was an early digital maker but never won much share; it also sold SprintScan film scanners before its 2001 bankruptcy.

Roughly how much did the Polavision flop eventually cost Polaroid in write-offs?

Its Dufaycolor-based technology was later improved for the Polachrome instant slide film system.