A Triumph of Genius

Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War

By: Ronald K. Fierstein

Narrated by: Pete Larkin

This riveting biography from the American Bar Association visits the spectacular life of Edwin Land, breakthrough inventor. At the time of his death, he stood third on the list of our most prolific inventors, behind only Thomas Edison and one of Edison's colleagues. Land's most famous achievement was the creation of a revolutionary film-and-camera system that could produce a photographic print moments after the picture was taken.

In A Triumph of Genius, you'll learn details of Land's involvement over four decades with top-secret U.S. military intelligence efforts during World War II and through the Cold War in the service of seven American presidents. Additionally you'll thrill to the compelling firsthand look at one of our nation's most important legal battles over intellectual property--Polaroid versus Kodak. The conflict led to an epic legal battle, a dramatic event for Land, who, from the witness stand, personally starred in a compelling courtroom drama.

©2015 Ronald K. Fierstein (P)2015 Tantor

Critic reviews

"Fierstein brings the story to life in such a way that at the end, the reader actually senses the huge emotional strain that such a long, fierce, and persistent battle entailed for those participating in it." (Paul M. Janicke, HIPLA professor of law, University of Houston Law Center)

Fascinating

Ronald K. Fierstein has obviously done a great deal of research about Edwin Land and his company. The author tells the fascinating story of the reclusive genius who, as a teen, invented the plastic polarizer, which is still used almost a century later in countless popular applications including sunglasses and LCD screens.

Edwin Land (1909-1991) also pioneered the revolutionary one-step system of photography. He also made critical contributions to top-secret U. S. military intelligence efforts during WWII and the cold war. He had 535 patents in his name.

The author goes into detail about Land’s inventions in a step by step process that left me feeling as if I was watching over Land’s shoulder. The section about the trial goes into great detail even to the number of hotel rooms rented for the attorneys, legal secretaries and paralegals. I was amazed how long the case took; five years for doing depositions alone with each person taking 6 weeks or more.

Land dropped out of Harvard University to start his company to produce his polarizer discovery. His father counseled him to protect his invention with a patent. He took his father’s advice to heart and earned the sobriquet “Champion of Patents.”

This book goes into detail about The Polaroid v Kodak patent lawsuit, the unprecedented account of the most significant patent litigation of the twentieth century. Ronald K. Fierstein was a young lawyer working with Edwin Land on the team of litigators representing Polaroid in court. He later became a successful entertainment attorney.

The book is well written and reads like a legal thriller. Peter Larkin narrated the book.

Great Story

Well researched account of the battle by Polaroid to defend their patents against infringement by Kodak.

A triumph to finish it

An important biographical account of E Land. I am very glad to have read it. It has also helped me to understand Steve Jobs because Land was his role model. Unfortunately it is so detailed and repetitive that it is very difficult to follow. I heard it at a much faster speed in order to keep me from being bored. I would look for an abridged version.

90% Legal Trivia; Scant Photographic Aesthetics

Despite its oddly grandiose title, this is mostly a legal (and to some extent commercial) history of the Polaroid company. The best chapters detail Polaroid's partnership with Kodak scientists in the 1950s and early 1960s to develop and manufacture the color negative for its first color cameras (this was news to me). Polaroid then gave scant credit to Kodak, refused to license Kodak to participate in any sales of film or other products, and set the stage for Kodak's hard-headed, ill-conceived, and apparently resentment-fueled entry in direct competition with Polaroid in the instant camera market. The book is a treasure for patent law students, as the narratives usually are framed by legal interests and patent law terms, but for people interested in photography or the drama of science, the book will lack vitality, but the book is still entertaining and is good bed-time reading; it is engaging, and there is little truly horrible behavior being described, so it is somewhat rare as a history book. I found the strangest deficiency of the book is that the value of 3x3 inch, low resolution, ultra-high contrast color photos is taken as a self-evident, needs-no-analysis photographic/ artistic "good" with no discussion of the aesthetics of these objects which were the holy grail of achievement for the "genius" of the book's title, Edwin Land. Having lived through the 60s and the 70s as a kid interested in photography, I was never tempted in the least by instant cameras at issue here; I do need their appeal explained and their images scrutinized. The real drama of the book is that so much human energy was spent litigating a dubious technology which became obsolete in another 15 years, and the Polaroid company, like several other titans of the 20th c. (including Kodak) imploded shortly thereafter. But the greatest defect of the book is that there is no sensible registration of the limitations (or aesthetic appeal) of the photos produced by instant cameras, or placement of these images and their tonal quality and resolution against other, similarly priced (non-instant) cameras which may have used film that cost 10% as much as Polaroid products. The book needed more art, irony, and photographic good sense.

Awesome! a very interesting subject. I loved it

a very interesting subject, I loved the first part, second part was tough but very well described.

Much too detailed if you're not a lawyer!

I completely agree with some of the review saying that it's much too detailed. I would add that it might be interesting for people who are really into law. Anyone else who is simply interested in Polaroids or Edwin Lands history can actually skip the second part if you listen to this audiobook in parts.

Intense and fascinating story!

This is an amazing chronicle. Yeah sure: lots of legal details etc. but what a history, what drama, and real life! I found it totally absorbing.

Genius, Greed, Hubris, and Legal Drama

Two books in one. It seems like a biography of Edwin H. Land, and that it is. It’s a story of genius about the man who still holds third place in the number of patents granted by the US Patent Office (with 535 patents, behind only Edison and Elihu Thompson) and whom Steve Jobs outspokenly admired and revered as "a national treasure," and who modeled much of his career after his. But it turns into a story of corporate greed and hubris with a 15-year patent war with Kodak and Land’s company as what started as a cooperative and mutually beneficial business relationship was was destroyed when Kodak decided to directly compete without regard to the patents Land and his company had received, assuming that, with it’s near infinite resources, it would prevail. The author, Ronald K. Fierstein, had a front row seat to this part of the book because he was a young attorney assigned to the team to work on this case, giving him access to not only the history, but to internal documents and records from both the company and the law office that would not be available to anyone else. Oh, and Land’s company was a familiar one to most of us as the maker of instant cameras, the Polaroid Company.
Land has a lot in common with a lot of the tech wizards of the computer era. He dropped out of Harvard in his first year because he had an idea and wanted to spend full time on developing it. He had long been obsessed with light and especially interested in polarization and what it could do. He experimented with ways to make glass polarize and just before his 20th birthday, he filed his first patent application for a plastic “sheet polarizer” to eliminate glare. His first target was automobile companies, hoping that they would adopt it to prevent the blinding glare of headlights at night, which caused many traffic accidents. However, it turned out to be a hard sell since it would only work if both cars used it. But it did turn out to be very attractive for reducing glare in photography, in film making, and in sunglasses. You’ve likely had a pair of sunglasses with his technology. And this also started his partnership with the Kodak Company.
World War II generated a steady stream of government orders for polarized instruments and tools, which bolstered the company financially through its early years. In fact, the crew of the Enola Gay wore “special Polaroid adjustable glasses” when they dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. But then something else tripped Land’s creative genius. In 1943, on a family vacation trip out west, his daughter complained of having to wait to send the film off to get it developed before she see the prints. Land began to think. Why couldn’t there be some way to automate, mechanize, and shrink all of that developing process to make it a part of the camera itself so that you could, at least within minutes, see you photo? He immediately started to think and take notes and when he returned to his lab, he got to work in earnest. To do so would not just be mechanical. It would require a different chemical process. But, light was his passion and he got to work.
At this point, a person who just wants a story might think that the “biography” is starting to lag because Fierstein goes into great detail about the process of doing so over several chapters, discussing chemical processes, the physics of light, the mechanics of loading and moving the film through the process, and so on. He details failures and success and how little ideas and tiny changes became crucial to making it work. He lists key patents that were received along the way. The first model produced sepia prints in 1948. In 1950, they became black and white. Peel-apart color came in 1963 and instant, watch-it-develop color was introduced in 1972. Geeks will love this part of the book and you begin to feel that the real subject is the Polaroid Camera with Land and his team playing supporting roles. But Polaroid outsourced the manufacturing of its film to Kodak, which produced and ever increasing profit stream for Kodak.
With such a growing market, Kodak decided that it must get in and after first trying to develop its own process, when Polaroid introduced its vastly superior camera in 1972, Kodak used its knowledge of Polaroid’s process to create its on. When Polaroid received word that Kodak was going to enter the instant photography market, they immediately sued for patent infringement even before the Kodak camera actually came on the market in 1976. And here the book shifts again because here Fierstein begans to also educate us on patent law and only the painfully slow legal process and how a good legal team can drag out a case for years. He also explains to us how fragil a patent is in spite of its power. A patent gives its holder a type of monopoly, at least over the exact product or process covered and for a limited period of time. Tweaks to the patent can extend it even longer. That gives the patent-holder some power and that power is granted by a patent office with absolute power to grant it. However, if the patent-holder decides that he must exercise that power against another, then the decision goes to the legal system and that brings risk because a judge can now study the patent again with all the persuasive arguments presented by the person accused of “stealing” that patent and the judge can invalidate the patent. And in the decades up until the 70s, when taken to court, most patents were invalidated.
Kodak tried to argue that Polaroid had abused the patent system by patenting “nominal advances” that were obvious to anyone skilled in the field and that they had tried to use the patent system to create an impenetrable wall that gave them a monopoly over an entire field that coud be perpetuated on with incremental patents. That was Kodak’s great gamble, that they could hire enough good minds to convince a judge who was not an expert to throw out Polaroids patents. Fierstein considers this case a turning point in the history of patent law that strengthened the patent system and he covers it also in great detail. Even for someone with little legal understanding, he explains everything very clearly and made it interesting enough to keep me from wanting to skip ahead. And in this part, Land also returned to take a key role, even as, toward the end, he had retired from the company. Land had another “genius” and that was the ability to distill complicated issues into simple statements and descriptions that almost anyone could understand. Land died shortly afterwards, in 1991.
The case tied both companies up for 15 years and in the end, Polaroid won, preserving 7 of the 10 patents that he challenged Kodak of infringing on. Kodak was ordered to pay over $1 billion. It had to buy back al the cameras sold during that time, write off a great deal of machinery, and lay of hundreds of workers. But it also distracted both companies from the next stage of “instant photography,” the digital revolution.
This book is more than a biography. It’s a legal thriller. It’s a technology nerd’s dream. And I enjoyed it. That’s not to say that everyone would, but it gave me a new appreciation for another of history’s geniuses.