"Like visiting a shrine," is how Steve Jobs described a meeting with Edwin Land. The founder of Apple adored Land, the co-founder of Polaroid, a pioneer of instant photography that with its mix of innovation, aesthetics and focus on consumer utility was in many ways the Apple of its day. Land was not only "one of the great inventors of our time", according to Jobs. "More importantly, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organisation to reflect that." Like Jobs, the adopted boy to whom he became a sort of father figure, Land was driven, sometimes to the point of obsession, a demanding taskmaster and occasionally difficult to deal with. Land's relative obscurity today reflects the fact that the inventions for which he was best known were rendered largely ob-solete by the very digital revolution that made Jobs into a business hero and cultural icon. The demise of film, linked to the rise of digital photography and mobile phones with top-quality cameras, contributed to Polaroid's bankruptcy in 2001 and that of its old rival, Kodak, 11 years later.
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