Invention Of Polaroid Camera

In 1943 a three-year-old girl asked a very simple question: why couldn't she look at a photograph of herself as soon as it was taken? Her father, Edwin Land, went away and invented a camera and film that would allow her to do just that.
Jennifer Land (USA) provides the perfect example of how a naive approach to a situation can lead to a breakthrough that a trained mind would never consider. Only a child (or an inventor) would have thought to ask why a photograph could not be seen the instant it was taken, and only an inventor would bother to find an answer rather than dismissing the question. Jennifer's father, Edwin Herbert Land (USA), said later: "Within an hour the camera, the film and the physical chemistry became so clear that with a great sense of excitement I hurried to a place where a friend was staying to describe to him in detail a dry camera that would give a picture immediately after exposure."
The concept may have been as instantaneous as the photography that was to follow, but the development of the idea was not quite rapid. It took three years to perfect the camera, which worked by passing the exposed negative between a set of rollers that ruptured a container of chemicals that, in turn, developed and printer a positive image. The camera then spat out a sepia-toned (brown and white) print that could be peeled away from the attached negative less than a minute after exposure. Land demonstrated his invention to the American Optical Society on 21 February 1947 and launched the Polaroid Land Instant Camera on 26 November 1948 to immediate acclaim, with sales in the region of $5 million in the first year.

Land did not rest on his laurels, but immediately began making improvements to his instant camera, filing some 300 patents over the next decade. The first improvement was the production of black and white rather than sepia prints, then came instant color prints in 1963 and then, in 1972, Polariod produced the SX-70 camera, whose photographs did not require peeling from their negative. The new SX-70 allowed users to watch prints develop in daylight before their very eyes, but even that remarkable advance seems rather quaint now, in the age of truly instantaneous digital photography.

Source - The Book Of Inventions by Ian Harrison