"CHRISTOPHER BONANOS: I have to start, obviously, by addressing a basic question. Which is, why should anybody care about a dead company called Polaroid? I should say up front that they're not exactly ..."

"In the late '70s, there were a billion Polaroid photos shot every year. And now, as a form, it's almost gone, for the simple reason, of course, that digital pictures are instant pictures. The chief ad..."

"Although we all exchange photos all the time on our phones and on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all the rest, something special happens when you take out one of these cameras in a social sett..."

"If it's a kid, they've never seen it before, and they're curious. And they will stare at the picture as it comes out of the murk. If it's their parents who are interested, they'll talk about the camer..."

"They were really a place about inventing things. It was an idea factory. There's a new book about Bell Labs called "The Idea Factory." And Polaroid worked much the same way. It was almost like a unive..."

"fetishized industrial design. They insisted on objects that feel good in the hand, and sort of demand that you pick them up when you see them. And both were run by visionary, demanding, genius, godhea..."

"done that, certainly not a chemist. At his shareholders' meetings, starting in the '60s, Land began to introduce products in a way that had never really been seen before. Shareholders' meetings back t..."

"film he made for one of these shareholders' meetings. It was in 1970, and he stood in an empty factory, that was just being completed and hadn't been fitted out yet, to show people what the SX-70 was ..."

"And 40 years later, you are doing exactly what he said. I mentioned that this started in the 1940s, but Polaroid is an older company than that. It started in 1932 under a different name, and became Po..."

"mostly making war material. And then it was going to have to shrink away, because it became evident, by 1944, that the war was ending. And Land knew he had to either fire people or come up with anothe..."

"And as soon as he got back to Cambridge, Massachusetts-- which is where he had started his company after leaving Harvard-- he started a little lab devoted to this project. And it gradually began to dr..."

"It was a spectacular moment. And within a very short time, it was patented. There is the patent. And the product made its debut the next year. It was a Jordan Marsh department store in Boston, which w..."

"It was a phenomenon, starting in the late '40s and into the '50s and '60s. It was even, I might add, a witness to history. It was such a ubiquitous product. All over TV, because of the commercials. It..."

"He was tasked with coming up with color while black and white was still in the works, at the very beginning. And essentially, Land told him, just watch what we do, follow it, and see what applies to c..."

"But the real fundamental change came, as I said, in 1972. Up until then, all these systems required peeling and sometimes coating the picture after it was produced. There was a lot of rigmarole involv..."

"And that camera was the SX-70, as I said. And I've got one of those as well. This is the product of $2 billion-- and now those are 1960s dollars-- in research. It is a fantastic little object. Remembe..."

"And as I said, it was a sensation. Cover of "Time," cover of "Life." And I will say that there were fans of this camera absolutely everywhere. Do I not have it on full screen? AUDIENCE: If you just pl..."

"There's someone you may have heard of. Andy Warhol loved Polaroid pictures, because they were spontaneous, because they were instantaneous. This particular picture you see is something very special. P..."

"It can't escape. If you lock it in your desk drawer, until somebody takes it from you and puts it on a scanner, it's yours. It is an addition of one. And thus, it's almost more like a painting than a ..."

"He thought of himself as part of the movement. So given that this was going so great, the question everybody has is where things started to go wrong. And as I said, the company peaked in the mid-'70s ..."

"was not an irresistible product. It had user experience flaws, we might say today. You had to use very bright lights, because the film was not very sensitive to light. So you had people squinting into..."

"chances are. You could argue that swapping videotapes-- or renting videotapes, whatever-- was the very, very beginning of something akin to file sharing, or BitTorrenting, or whatever way you swap mov..."

"He stopped going to parties. He had nothing to do with the place. The other thing that happened was that Kodak, as I said, which had begun to perceive Polaroid as a competitor, decided to actually com..."

"And what they had done was hire lawyers to go through all of Polaroid's patents, and see if they could do a bob and weave and get around it. Some of this may sound familiar, too. So what they'd done, ..."

"company that was in the business of coming up with the future. In those years, as I said, Land was no longer running the company. Two insiders followed him as CEO. And they did some good work. Through..."

"And they kept saying, well, where's the money in this? We can't make any money without film. The inkjet printer mistake is tougher to understand, because it's precisely the same business model. You kn..."

"You had to keep everything going. So the solution to that was to keep cranking out more and more film, and to goose that market over and over. And that meant more plastic, cheap cameras, many of which..."

"What started to happen was a small but noticeable return to analog instant photography, not as a mass market product, but as an interesting something else-- an alternative to digital, call it. You sta..."

"which is interesting to an artist or a creative person of any kind. Nonetheless, they ran out of ingredients in 2008, 2009, shut everything down, because they had to. They had stopped ordering them. T..."

"And it didn't work very well. It looked smudgy and brown. And as it came out of the camera, you had to dive around the front and cover it with a piece of cardboard, because it was a little light sensi..."

"I will show you. That's inside the Waltham plant, by the way. That is an Impossible picture that I shot about four weeks ago. That's the little boy I was telling you about earlier, my son, who gets ph..."

"turned out to be important. The third thing is that the museum pieces-- this kind of stuff-- Polaroid also had a little museum collection. And it went to the MIT Museum in Cambridge, which is just an ..."

"It was about basic research. And it was on the Charles River in Cambridge. And because they had all this money from the Polaroid stock, they built a very nice building. It worked a little like the Ins..."

"if you Google it. He spent years trying to-- he would often do these demonstrations, where he would show a black-and-white picture through a color filter, and, with a single filter of yellow or red, w..."

"As the Institute for Advanced Study is a separate little island within Princeton, the Rowland is within Harvard's structure. Any more? Yes. AUDIENCE: How did you first become involved in Polaroids, an..."

"And they were really unhappy about that guy Petters, who I mentioned earlier, who had clearly been doing something nefarious. And they were angry. And that got me curious. And then I started, as I was..."

"So a book project was a lifeboat. Any other questions? AUDIENCE: Can we look at them-- can you hold up the SX-70? CHRISTOPHER BONANOS: Sure thing. AUDIENCE: Because when you held it up, and you said i..."

"This was their professional model. This was the expensive one in that line. And I had the cheaper one on my shoulder. And a guy sees me on the subway, and he leans in close, and he says, do you have a..."