Before Steve Jobs, there was Edwin Land

Before there was Steve Jobs, there was Edwin Land. The founder of Polaroid Corp. and the driving force behind its instant camera, Land was a science-obsessed, self-educated perfectionist with a gift for marketing. He created a company that set the model for the successful Silicon Valley startup in its ability to commercialize cutting-edge technology and willingness to privilege research over immediate profit and he became a titan of American business after World War II. Jobs not only called him "a national treasure" but imitated Polaroid's rainbow-striped packaging in Apple Inc.'s logo.

Land's story dominates Christopher Bonanos' new book, "Instant: The Story of Polaroid" (Princeton Architectural Press), which is also noteworthy for its numerous images of the cameras and of photographs taken with them by artists ranging from anonymous amateurs to Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol. The posthumous lionization of Jobs has given new relevance to Land's successes, and Polaroid's collapse is now a pendant to the 2012 bankruptcy of its longtime rival Eastman Kodak Co., because both companies were once leaders in technology and innovation but -- embroiled in litigation against each other -- were unable to compete with younger rivals from overseas and Silicon Valley.

Born in Bridgeport, Conn., in 1909, Land matriculated at Harvard College but soon dropped out to focus on scientific research. He invented the world's first synthetic polarizer in 1928 and got a patent on it the next year. Then with George Wheelwright III, his physics instructor at Harvard, he launched Land-Wheelwright Laboratories in Cambridge, Mass., to commercialize the technology.

The company, renamed Polaroid in 1937, made a range of products in its early years, including applications for the military during World War II and the U-2 spy plane. Its breakthrough came with the introduction of the instant camera, which was wildly successful from its introduction in 1948. Even though Kodak, by far the country's dominant camera company at the time, didn't have a rival product, it judged Polaroid so insignificant a competitor that for the next 20 years it made the negative layer in every piece of Polaroid film. The 60% profit margins that Polaroid made on that film allowed it to invest heavily in research and development.

Some of the money went to steady improvements in film quality, but Polaroid also spent roughly $600 million developing its SX-70 instant camera in the 1960s and 1970s. By then, Kodak did see Polaroid as a serious threat, and it came out with its own instant camera in 1976. Polaroid immediately sued for patent infringement in federal court in Massachusetts in 1976, and the companies spent the next 14 years litigating the claims.

During that fight, both American patent law and the photography business changed dramatically. U.S. courts tended to be skeptical of patent claims in the 1960s and 1970s, but in 1982, Congress created the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit as the sole appellate forum for patent law. No longer would appeals courts in the 13 federal circuits develop case law in the area with modest oversight from the Supreme Court, which showed little interested in patent law. Instead, the CAFC would offer a unified regime -- one that accorded much greater deference to patents than the federal courts previously had.

Cecil Quillen Jr., Kodak's general counsel at the time of the Polaroid case, told Bonanos that the mere creation of the CAFC may well have changed the outcome in the case before Judge Rya Zobel of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts by signaling that Congress expected much stricter enforcement of patents. In 1986, Zobel enjoined Kodak from producing its instant camera, an exceptionally unusual outcome. In a subsequent trial for damages, Polaroid won a $909 million award. The 1990 award was the largest ever granted by a U.S. court for patent infringement, although it was a fraction of the $5.72 billion that Polaroid sought or the $1.5 billion that Wall Street expected. Kodak stock actually rose on the news, while Polaroid shares fell by more than 20%.

"It's hard to figure out what [Polaroid] can do to really turn around earnings in the long run," one Wall Street analyst said at the time, and Polaroid never did. The company filed for Chapter 11 in 2001 after the rise of digital photography crippled its business and eventually that of Kodak, which declared bankruptcy in January 2012. The $909 million damages award, it turned out, was a transfer from one doomed company to another.

Perhaps because of the management focus the litigation consumed and the prospect of a large award, Polaroid was unable to respond to changes in how Americans created, stored and displayed visual images. The failures were especially galling because as early as the 1970s Land anticipated "a camera which you would use not only on the occasion of parties only, or of trips only, or when your grandchildren came to see you, but a camera that you would use as often as your pencil or your eyeglasses ... something that was always with you."

Instead of creating such a ubiquitous device, Polaroid spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the 1970s developing a video camera, but it couldn't compete with Sony's Betamax and better technologies that came later. The failure of that effort, Polavision, cost Land his job as chairman, and he died in 1991, estranged from a company that ran out of energy, will and creativity. Polaroid didn't manufacture printers because the executives thought the images weren't good enough. Instead, Hewlett-Packard Co. took control of that market, while Xerox Corp. came to own the copier market -- the one commercial success to come out of Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, Calif., (although one that paid for all the research that went on there many, many times over). Polaroid also failed to exploit its expertise in specialized niches such as identification systems and medical and dental imaging.

Bonanos briskly details the management missteps that doomed Polaroid, but he fails to note that its decline mirrored that of its region. The Radiation Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the center of American scientific research during World War II, and federal defense research funding at MIT and Harvard made Route 128 an early locus of the technology industry. Defense contracting helped keep Polaroid alive during World War II, and the company was fortunate in the decades thereafter to be in an area rich with engineering and scientific talent.

Even at the board level, Polaroid benefited from its milieu. Ken Olsen, the co-founder and chairman of Digital Electric Corp., was a longtime member of Polaroid's board. Bonanos notes that Olsen said Land "was teaching him how not to do succession," but DEC itself steadily lost ground to its rivals and was bought by Compaq Corp. in 1998.

By the 1980s, Silicon Valley had outstripped Route 128, which has by now been thoroughly routed in the battle for tech supremacy. In the years before its bankruptcy, Polaroid didn't even seem to see itself as a technology company; in 1995 the company tapped as its new CEO Gary DiCamillo, who had been at Black & Decker. Six years later, Polaroid was in Chapter 11.

Being in the Valley is no guarantee of uninterrupted success, as shown by the struggles of both HP and Yahoo! Inc., but at least those companies have a chance to hire the next Steve Jobs or Edwin Land, or engineers who can make a CEO look like one for a time. Polaroid in Cambridge, Mass., and Kodak in Rochester, N.Y., did not.