In October 2001, the original Polaroid Corporation had filed for bankruptcy in the US. If you draw up an organisation of 200 people making ten million films, whose interest is it in? The customer's, but not the top management's." "That's the problem with big companies - back then, Polaroid was still 5,000 people. The factory was equipped to crank out 100 million film packs a year, but Bosman had a strategy for profitably producing ten million. Years earlier, he had drawn up a survival plan for a smaller-scale operation. With his neat, scraped back hair, Bosman, now 56, is enthusiastic but extremely precise, choosing all his words with care. In 28 years with the firm, he had risen from engineer to factory manager. The factory continued to produce, ship and sell films -24million of them in 2008 alone - but the scarcity of raw materials and the shift from film had numbered its days.Īndré Bosman was the man Polaroid charged with shutting down the Enschede complex. But by 2004, the digital-photography revolution had led the company to refocus. At its peak, in 1991, sales of cameras and films were close to $3 billion. Polaroid instant film was an immediate success.
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Pressure rollers in the camera spread the chemicals across the paper when it was exposed, activating the reaction that developed the print. It held the developing solution in a hermetically sealed compartment bundled with the photosensitive paper. From there, he created Polaroid instant film.
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As a first-year student at Harvard, Land thought it might be possible to create polarising film by lining up crystals of iodoquinine sulphate and embedding them in transparent plastic to prevent them from moving apart. All 57 cameras sold out on the first day.īefore Land, photography involved exposing light-sensitive material, developing, fixing and printing it. The company estimated that the stock would last until it could manufacture a second run. Fifty-seven of that first batch went on sale before Christmas 1948 at Jordan Marsh, a Boston department store.
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Polaroid made only 60 units of Land's first instant camera, the Land Camera.