Dr. Land was one of the most visionary inventors in the history of the US. My friend Anne who works for The Impossible Project told me about speaking with former Polaroid employees who worked with him, and getting all teary eyed hearing the way they talked about him. You don’t see many people who have that vision and inspire that kind of loyalty.“You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company—which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of.
So Land, at 75, went off to spend the remainder of his life doing pure science, trying to crack the code of color vision. The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be—not an astronaut, not a football player—but this.”
Steve Jobs describing one of his biggest heroes, Dr. Edwin Land in 1985.
(Source: thesmallwave.com)
