Jewish Invention Myth: The Instant Camera

The Instant Camera is a jewish invention myth that was genuinely a challenge to look into as it seemed solid until you started digging and then things didn’t really make a lot of sense. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Since first we should document the claim made by jews.

Aish claims as follows:

‘Edwin Land, cofounder of the Polaroid Corporation, made it possible for pictures to be taken and developed almost immediately. In 1947 he demonstrated the Polaroid Land Camera, which could produce a finished print in 60 seconds. Land’s photographic process soon found many applications in business, science and the military. Before he died in 1991, the New Englander had received more than 500 patents for his innovations in light and plastics.’ (1)

‘MNews’ writes similarly that:

‘Edwin Land – Polaroid camera, spy eavesdropping systems, and more

Edwin Land patented 535 inventions. Among them were polarizer, X-ray film, night-vision military devices, and more. Land's greatest achievement was the Polaroid company he founded, which sold about one billion cameras a year in the mid-1970s. It was he who set the prototype for the successful Silicon Valley startup, and Apple founder Steve Jobs called Land his boyhood idol.’ (2)

Given this effusive praise and also the other websites which promote the idea that Edwin Land invented the instant camera (aka the Polaroid) it is rather surprising that Land doesn’t feature on more jewish achievement lists.

Especially since he is described in effusive terms by other non-jewish websites.

For example:

‘Adjust the lighting, lock your focus, press the button, and you'll have the photo in your hand in less than a minute. We can all agree that instant cameras have been popular for a long time, whether it's for taking aesthetic images with friends or capturing your child's first steps. There's no disputing that instant cameras have been popular, but did you know that the first instant camera was released in 1948?

The instant camera's origins may be traced back to the 1940s, when Edwin Land, a scientist and investor, was on vacation and wanted to take a photograph of his three-year-old daughter. The daughter inquired as to why she couldn't see the photo immediately. This gave him the idea and in November of 1948, he released the first-ever instant camera model, the 95 Land Camera, the world's first instant camera.’ (3)

Yet there is something rotten in Denmark in this description because while Land first brought out this first Polaroid instant camera in 1947 and we are treated to a clearly apocryphal story about how his three-year-old daughter Jennifer Land asked him in 1943 about why she couldn’t have the photo he had just taken instantly. (4)

The problem is that the Polaroid corporation – which was despite frequently misstatements was not founded in 1937 but rather in 1932 as Land-Wheelwright Laboratories which was only re-named to Polaroid in 1937 – was originally founded to produce – and continued to specialise in – in optical filters used in sunglasses and scientific equipment not in camera or photographic technology. (5)

Just how Land came up with the chemical and physical processes that lay behind the instant photos of the Polaroid camera between 1943 and 1947 is unclear. (6) However, buried deep in the literature on Land’s alleged discovery we start to find references about where the technology almost certainly came from.

In the first instance we find that Land employed Meroë Marston Morse – the daughter of a Princeton Maths Professor – who joined Polaroid in June 1945 and moved a couple months later to the SX-70 lab within Polaroid developing the instant camera and worked 16 hours days until the instant camera was presented to the world in 1947. We should note that even Polaroid clearly state that she was key to the creation of the Polaroid (7) and that alone should ring alarm bells about why Land gets all the credit, but Morse is barely even mentioned given that Land was a consummate self-publicist and doesn’t seem to have been keen on giving credit to others despite insisting the opposite was true later in life. (8)

This in and of itself would give us room to doubt the sole crediting of Land with the invention of the instant camera, but there is more to this.

This is the fact that a Hungarian scientist named Andor (sometimes given as Andre) Rott who had begun working for Gevaert Photo-Producten NV in the Netherlands after working for the Continental Film Factory in Budapest from 1923 to 1926 had patented a process called ‘Diffusion Transfer Reversal’ in 1939 which has been described as follows:

‘The photographed surface or object immediately appears as a positive, i.e. an image corresponding to the dark and light shades of the original. When developing the image, the fixative and the calling material are present at the same time, and they immediately interact.’ (9)

Two years later in 1941 a German scientist Edith Weyde – who had worked for I. G. Farben’s photographic subsidiary AGFA since 1932 – came up with and patented a similar process called ‘Silver Salt Diffusion Transfer’. (10) That German patent is described by Weyde as ‘Process for the accelerated production of a photographic positive image from a template’, which gives you an immediate sense that Weyde had discovered a process which allowed the instant production of images from photographs. (11)

Rott and Weyde were the lead scientists developing the instant copying of images and patenting their processes years for the big European photographic rivals Gevaert and AGFA years before Land’s apocryphal incident with his daughter in 1943.

Interestingly Rott published a paper ‘Un nouveau principe de linversion: linversion-transfert par diffusion’ in the French journal ‘Sciences et Industries Photographiques’ in 1942 which has been speculated to be the origin of Land’s ‘invention’ several years later. (12)

It is also worth noting that Rott and Weyde’s work on the production of instant photographic images – which they later worked on together after Gevaert and AGFA became AGFA-Gevaert N.V. in 1964 – produced an instant photo paper that was marketed by Gevaert under the name ‘Transargo’ from 1941 and Weyde’s process resulted in instant camera photos that were used by the Luftwaffe for air reconnaissance from 1942. (13)

As one German researcher explained in 2008:

‘So both, Agfa and Gevaert, made products out of the ideas from their chemists. But with the exception of this reconnaissance film only office instant copy materials. Strange enough both companies deem not to have envisaged more potential in the meaning of a consumer camera film. (Circumstances in Europe were discouraging too.)

It needed Edwin Land to do so.’ (14)

The point is well taken and what we are being here is that while Rott and Weyde developed instant photography (where what is important is the paper and ink not the camera itself): they were not used as a consumer product but rather as an industrial and military product. Hence their work was also the basis of the ‘Copyrapid’ brand for industrial and office photocopying later.

All that Land did was take an extant concept after the Second World War, refine the process a bit to change the chemicals (this was probably the role Morse played), patented it in 1947 (Rott had re-patented his process in the USA in 1947) and then claimed credit via the Optical Society of America in the same year.

Further evidence for this version of events is found in Victor McElheny 1998 biography of Land where he recounts how in 1947 Lloyd Varden – technical director of the Pavelle Color Company of New York and a fellow of the Photographic Society of America – challenged Land over the fact that he had not sufficiently acknowledged the influence and work of Rott and Land in his Polaroid camera. (15)

Land’s response to Varden was telling in so far as he claimed that his Polaroid was unique and that he didn’t need to cite Rott or Weyde’s work (16) and it was later discovered that his patent lawyer Charles Mikulka had also missed Rott’s similar patent because it had been classified under ‘Decorative’ rather than ‘Photography’. (17)

In 1972 Mikulka wrote about how Land had damaged his reputation by not citing Rott and Weyde’s work in his paper for the Optical Society of America in 1947 where Land claimed credit for the invention and how he had then had to deescalate the situation by citing Rott and Weyde in his 1949 lecture at the Science Museum in London, England. (18)

Interestingly the situation – which was escalating towards a large scale and very public patent infringement/theft intellectual property lawsuit due to Varden’s having called attention to the role of Rott and Weyde’s work and patents in Land’s patent and his new Polaroid product – was solved quietly behind closed doors by Land who negotiated a significant financial settlement with both AGFA and Gevaert – Weyde and Rott’s respective employers – and pledged that Polaroid would stay out of the document copying market in return for Agfa and Gevaert leaving consumer photo taking for Polaroid. (19)

Unsurprisingly Varden was also made a consultant at Polaroid soon after (20) presumably as payment for his silence over Land’s infringement of Rott and Wedye’s work and thus AGFA and Gevaert’s intellectual property.

Thus, we can see how that while Land produced the first commercial instant camera for consumers in 1947: he didn’t actually invent the Polaroid which seems to have actually been Meroë Marston Morse sometime between 1945 and 1946 in the United States while the actual process of making instant photos from cameras had already been created separately by both Andor Rott in 1939 and Edith Weyde in 1941.

Land then actively covered this up in 1947-1948 and this having failed due to Varden’s very public intervention credited Rott and Weyde in 1949, did a backroom deal with a financial settlement with Rott and Weyde’s employers and bought off Varden with a well-paid position at Polaroid.

So, no: Edwin Land didn’t invent the Instant Camera.

Andor Rott and Edith Weyde did.

References

(1) https://aish.com/10-big-jewish-inventions/

(2) https://mnews.world/en/news/the-great-jews-and-their-inventions

(3) https://shop.kodakphotoprinter.com/blogs/news/the-history-of-instant-cameras

(4) https://www.slashgear.com/808231/the-fascinating-history-of-polaroid-cameras/; https://petapixel.com/2015/06/11/the-history-and-magic-of-instant-photography/?fbclid=IwAR0JKfozf3C0g_-bD4LacbIZEzoGzxGf_bo14G0tVurJUBcK4pQxhI8Ba8E; https://analoguewonderland.co.uk/pages/brief-history-of-polaroid-film

(5) Victor K. McElheny, 1998, ‘Insisting On The Impossible: The Life Of Edwin Land’, 1st Edition, Basic Books: New York, p. 69

(6) For example, on the startling lack of specifics on how Land got from concept to camera see: National Academy of Sciences, 1999, ‘Biographical Memoirs’, Vol. 77, 1st Edition, The National Academies Press: Washington D.C., pp. 205-206

(7) https://www.polaroid.com/en_gb/blog/articles/celebrating-womens-history-month

(8) https://www.ft.com/content/907256a8-40d2-11e9-9bee-efab61506f44; McElheny, Op. Cit., pp. 194-196

(9) https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rott_Andor#Munk%C3%A1ss%C3%A1ga

(10) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Weyde#Inventions

(11) https://patents.google.com/patent/DE887733C/en29

(12) https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rott_Andor#Munk%C3%A1ss%C3%A1ga

(13) https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/polaroid-discontinued-boston-globe-02-08-08.35668/page-4

(14) Ibid.

(15) McElheny, Op. Cit., pp. 194-195

(16) Ibid., p. 195

(17) Ibid., p. 196

(18) Ibid.

(19) Ibid.

(20) Ibid.