48 Fun Facts About Polaroid

Which OutKast hit told listeners to "shake it like a Polaroid picture"?

Hey Ya! made the line a catchphrase, and Polaroid had to post a notice that modern prints dry behind a plastic window and need no shaking at all.

In which Massachusetts city did Polaroid keep its headquarters for most of the twentieth century?

Cambridge is where Land rented his first lab, a garage, in 1932, and the company that grew out of it kept its headquarters in the city into the 1990s.

Which product was an early money-maker for Polaroid in the 1930s, long before it made cameras?

Sunglasses with Land's glare-cutting lenses went on sale in the mid-1930s, and the money they brought in helped pay for the research that followed.

Which university did Edwin Land drop out of to pursue his research on polarised light?

Harvard lost him twice, the second time in 1932 without a degree, yet it later gave its dropout an honorary degree.

Whose question during a holiday in Santa Fe gave Edwin Land the idea for instant photography?

Land's three-year-old daughter asked why she couldn't see the picture he had just taken of her, and he later said that within the hour he had worked out the camera, the film and the chemistry.

Which American photographer did Polaroid hire as a consultant in the late 1940s?

Ansel Adams, a close friend of Land, went on advising the company for decades and wrote a how-to book, Polaroid Land Photography.

In which city did the first Land Camera go on sale in 1948, at the Jordan Marsh department store?

Boston shoppers got it first, on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and every camera brought to the store was sold that same day.

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 Christopher Nolan thriller does a man who cannot form new memories hunt a killer using annotated Polaroid photos?

Memento opens on a Polaroid of a dead man that fades back to blank, because the scene is running in reverse, a first hint that the story will be told backwards.

What type of camera was Polaroid's SX-70 of 1972?

A folding single-lens reflex, it collapsed into a leather-covered slab about an inch thick, slim enough for Land to pull one from his coat pocket at the 1972 unveiling.

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

Autofocus here worked by sound, not light: the camera timed an ultrasonic echo off the subject, so it could focus even in a dark room.

Which group of buyers was Polaroid's cheap 1965 Swinger camera pitched at?

Teenagers were the target, so the price was held under twenty dollars, which made the Swinger the first truly cheap instant camera.

Which kind of film did the low-priced Swinger camera of 1965 take?

Black and white only, even though Polaroid's colour film had been on sale for two years: the Swinger was built down to a price.

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

A pod of reagent holds only a few drops, and the rollers spread them in a thin layer between the negative and the picture as the print slides out.

Which instant home-movie system did Polaroid launch in 1977, only to write it off two years later?

Polavision films were silent, ran under three minutes and needed their own tabletop viewer, and buyers stayed away.

Which rival technology, with sound and far longer running times, sank Polaroid's instant home movies of 1977?

Videotape recorders gave sound and an hour or more per cassette, while each of Polaroid's silent film cartridges was over in under three minutes.

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

Kodak had announced its own instant cameras only days before, and when it finally lost it had to scrap them and offer cash or coupons to people who had bought one.

Which revered British stage actor fronted the 1972 television adverts for Polaroid's SX-70 camera?

Laurence Olivier took the job on one condition, written into his contract: the adverts must never be shown in Britain.

What did Polaroid do in October 2001?

File for bankruptcy is what it did, and within a year the Polaroid name and most of the business had been sold to new owners.

Which later tech giant is Edwin Land's Polaroid often likened to?

Apple is the usual comparison: Steve Jobs borrowed Land's line about working where science meets art, and called Polaroid's ousting of Land one of the dumbest things he had ever heard of.

Which 1990s pop group put its name to a Polaroid instant camera of its own?

Spice Girls fans could buy the Spice Cam in the late 1990s, one of a run of celebrity tie-ins that did nothing to stop Polaroid's slide.

Polaroid's owner was arrested in 2008 for running which kind of fraud?

A Ponzi scheme worth billions earned Tom Petters a fifty-year sentence, and Polaroid, which he had bought for its famous name, was sold off once more.

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

Lady Gaga showed the results a year later at a Las Vegas electronics show: a line of gadgets she had co-designed, including a mobile printer for phone photos.

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

The Impossible Project paid $3.1 million for the closing factory's equipment in 2008 and had its first new film on sale in 2010.

The last Polaroid film factory stood in Enschede, a town in which country?

The Netherlands is right: when the Enschede plant closed in 2008, a group that included former employees took it over and put its production line back to work.

Which Taylor Swift album has a Polaroid of the singer as its cover?

1989 shows Swift in a Polaroid frame with her face cut off at the eyes, and each CD came with thirteen more prints from a set of sixty-five, each with a handwritten lyric line.

Which photo app launched in 2010 with square pictures and filters that copied the faded look of old Polaroids?

Instagram gave phone snaps the washed-out tones of old instant prints, and at first every picture had to be square.

What was the revived film company called from 2017 until 2020?

Polaroid Originals lasted under three years: in March 2020 the company dropped the second word and launched its next camera under the old name alone.

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

Go needed a new film of its own, a miniature version of the classic square print, which went on sale with the camera in April 2021.

Whose patent tally is Land's most often measured against?

Thomas Edison finished with more than a thousand American patents, about double the total Land amassed without ever finishing a degree.

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

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

Land's 'retinex' theory set out to explain how people perceive what?

Colour, Land argued, is worked out by the eye and the brain together, which is why an object seems to keep its colour even when the light falling on it changes.

Land never finished his degree, yet Polaroid staff always addressed him by which title?

Doctor it was: staff, friends and the press called him Dr. Land to the end, though the only doctorates he ever held were honorary ones.

Which honour was Land awarded in 1963?

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is one of the highest honours an American civilian can be given, a long way up for a man who quit college to tinker with light filters.

What did Land do next after he was eased out of Polaroid?

Set up a research institute is right: at his Rowland Institute for Science he went back to pure experiments and kept at them until his death in 1991.

In 1970, Polaroid workers protested that the company's instant photos were being used in which country's passbooks?

South Africa made its Black citizens carry photo passbooks, and the workers' campaign pushed Polaroid to stop selling to that government in 1971 and to leave the country in 1977.

Polaroid's late-1970s television adverts paired James Garner and Mariette Hartley so convincingly that viewers assumed the two were what?

Married is what millions of viewers took them for, thanks to the relaxed, teasing banter of adverts that became a pop-culture hit in their own right.

Which Japanese company makes the Instax cameras that became Polaroid's great rival in instant photography?

Fujifilm won so thoroughly that in 2010 Polaroid put its own badge on an Instax Mini and sold it as the Polaroid 300.

What did 1939 World's Fair crowds watch through Polaroid filters?

A 3-D film it was, made for Chrysler: seen through polarised viewers, a Plymouth car seemed to dance itself together in mid-air.

Which pop artist shot his Polaroid portraits with a cheap Big Shot camera?

Andy Warhol owned an SX-70 too, yet his favourite was reportedly the cheap, ungainly Big Shot, which he turned on the celebrities who sat for him.

The man who started a laboratory with Land in 1932, the business that grew into Polaroid, had been Land's what?

Physics instructor George Wheelwright taught Land, then quit teaching to bankroll a laboratory with his student, and five years later that lab became Polaroid.

In which sunny US city did Polaroid first put the SX-70 on sale, banking on its camera-happy holidaymakers?

Miami got it first in late 1972 because Polaroid loved Florida: holidaymakers took lots of snapshots there and then went home and showed them to their friends.

At which regular company event did Land unveil the SX-70 in 1972?

The shareholders' meeting was his stage: in April 1972 he fired off five SX-70 photographs in about ten seconds while Polaroid's investors looked on.

Which plastic Polaroid of 1977 cost $39.95, under a quarter of the SX-70's price?

The Model 1000 OneStep got there by cutting corners: a fixed-focus lens and bare plastic where the SX-70 wore leather, yet it took the same film.

Besides its ten sheets of film, what did every SX-70 film pack carry inside it?

A flat battery rode in every pack to run the motor, the electronics and the flash, so loading fresh film also meant loading fresh power.

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

Life showed Land aiming his new SX-70 while a cluster of children grabbed at the photograph whizzing out of it.

Which technology, blamed for killing instant film, did Polaroid sell in 1996?

Digital cameras were no surprise to Polaroid: its PDC-2000 of 1996 was a serious professional model, yet the company never won much of the market that undid its film.

What became of the intensely private Land's personal papers and laboratory notes?

They were destroyed on purpose rather than archived, and a fire at his house later took whatever was left.