Edwin Land
Edwin Land
Edwin Herbert Land, ForMemRS, FRPS, Hon.MRIwas an American scientist and inventor, best known as the co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation. Among other things, he invented inexpensive filters for polarizing light, a practical system of in-camera instant photography, and his retinex theory of color vision. His Polaroid instant camera, which went on sale in late 1948, made it possible for a picture to be taken and developed in 60 seconds or less...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth7 May 1909
CityBridgeport, CT
CountryUnited States of America
Work only on problems that are manifestly important and seem to be nearly impossible to solve. That way you will have a natural market for your product and no competition.
If you are able to state a problem - any problem - and if it is important enough, then the problem can be solved,
Look, if the picture you get instantly is as beautiful as the picture you get by waiting seven days, then it is absolute madness to say that there is virtue in waiting.
A premature attempt to explain something that thrills you will destroy your perceptivity rather than increase it, because your tendency will be to explain away rather than seek out.
You think that the only thing that counts is the bottom line! What a presumptuous thing to say. The bottom line is in heaven.
The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it.
True creativity is characterized by a succession of acts each dependent on the one before and suggesting the one after.
Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.
When Arthur Ashe plays tennis, his purpose each day is to play the game in a way he has never played it before. It may be a backhand he uses, one that he may never have used before in that circumstance. His play is a fresh integration of his world at the instant of action. A really great scientist has the whole past at his disposal. At any instant he is rebuilding the world, molecule by molecule, in his subconscious. That is what you want in an athlete or a scientist.
The present is the past biting into the future.
Photography is unlike any other art form. In the other arts there is always a continuous interplay between the artist and his art. He has the painting or sculpture before him. What we have tried to do is to provide a medium for "artistic expression" to anyone with only a reasonable amount of time. By giving him a camera system with which he need only control his selection of focus, composition and lighting, we free him to select the moment and to criticize immediately what he has done. We enable him to see what else he wants to do on the basis of what he has just learned.
It only takes a day to change someone from an anti-intellectual to an intellectual by persuading him that he might be one!
The role of science is to be systematic, to be accurate, to be orderly, but it certainly is not to imply that the aggregated, successful hypotheses of the past have the kind of truth that goes into a number system.
In a few wretched buildings, we created a whole new industry with international significance.