The Tragic Downfall of Polaroid — The Genius Founder Who REFUSED to See VHS Coming and Doomed It

In April 1977, Edwin Land, the inventor of the instant photograph, showed Polaroid shareholders instant movies. Polavision filmed, developed and played your footage in about ninety seconds. Four months later, the first VHS recorder went on sale in the United States and could record for up to four hours. A Polavision cartridge held two minutes and thirty-five seconds, with no sound. By 1979 Polaroid had written off $68.5 million, and by 1982 Land had left the company he founded. This Corporate Autopsy opens the file on Polaroid's instant movie camera: how the Polavision system worked, why Land's own president, William McCune, argued against it, what it did to the Austrian maker Eumig, and how the founder's exit changed Polaroid. Then we test the big claim. Was Polavision the mistake that began Polaroid's downfall, or a flop the company survived on its way to a $2.3 billion peak, the Kodak patent victory, and its 2001 bankruptcy? Would you have bought Polavision for about $700 in 1978? And who do you blame for the fall of Polaroid: Land, the managers who followed him, or the technology no film company could stop? Tell us in the comments, along with the Polaroid camera your family owned. Subscribe to Corporate Autopsy for forensic documentaries on how famous American companies really died. Land died in 1991, the same year Kodak paid Polaroid for copying his invention. Around the time of the SX-70, he described a camera that would be like the telephone, something you use all day long. Today almost everyone carries that camera, and it doesn't need a single drop of Polaroid's chemistry. #Polaroid #Polavision #CorporateAutopsy