Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, March 10, 2008 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
Victor McElheny
"Edwin Land of Polaroid: Innovator in Public and in Secret"
ABSTRACT -- Edwin Land (1909-1991), a passionate student of optics from boyhood, is very well known as the inventor of instant photography. This new system was first disclosed at a scientific meeting in 1947, and between 1950 and 1970 multiplied the sales of a small plastic polarizer company Land had founded 10 years earlier by more than 100 times. Millions took up pictures-in-a-minute, and Land repeatedly revolutionized his own revolution to accommodate color and then dispense with peel-apart films. The first system was imagined as a whole in 1943, and was centered on a a new positive that ferried silver back and forth for simultaneous development of positive and negative, and a highly automated camera that presented unforgiving challenges. But Land also had a parallel career that may have been more significant than a means for people to enjoy images of the fun they were having right away. This was his secret, central role in working through in 1954 the rationale for America's U-2 spy planes and Corona spy satellites, as a vital way to determine actual, as opposed to imputed, Soviet military capabilities. The reconnaissance system, devised by a secret subcommittee small enough to fit in a car where it could deliberate without fear of bugging, fit in with President Eisenhower's twin challenge of preventing a nuclear Pearl Harbor while avoiding ruinous military spending. These questions arose immediately after the first big American test explosion of a "dry" H-bomb, "Bravo," on 1 March 1954. Eisenhower asked that a panel, headed by James R. Killian of MIT, work out in secret the best American offense, defense, and intelligence to avoid nuclear Armageddon, and Land headed the intelligence panel. In the years to come, Land's eloquence was often called on to sell the concepts in the face of fierce opposition. For many years, Land was a relentlessly optimistic senior consultant on the many-hurdled challenges of getting the pictures and getting them back. He and his colleagues faced the dilemmas that only became public in 1957 after Sputnik went up -- so well, indeed, that Eisenhower enlisted Land and two colleagues to draft a rationale and program for what became NASA in 1958. He liked the resulting paper so much that the White House printed it specially during the debates on the future of America's place in space.
SPEAKER -- Victor McElheny has been covering science and technology for the public since 1957, when he went into newspaper work in the South after graduating from Harvard. He reported for the Charlotte, NC, Observer (1957-63), Sweden Now (from Stockholm, 1963-64), Science magazine (from London, 1964-66), The Boston Globe (1966-72, including coverage of the Apollo moon missions), and, after a year as consultant at Polaroid Corporation during the launch of the SX-70 system, for the New York Times (1973-78). A major focus since the early 1960s has been the advances in biology following on the discovery of the double helix. At the Times, he wrote the first newspaper story about reccombinant DNA, the source of today's biotechnology industry. In 1978-82, he was the inaugural director of the Banbury Center of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which focused on environmental cancer risks. In 1982, he joined MIT as founding director of its nine-month program for science journalists, now called the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships. As a Visiting Scholar at MIT since 1998, he has given full time to writing, publishing his biography of Land, Insisting on the Impossible (Perseus 1998); and of James D. Watson, Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution (Perseus 2003). Since 2003 he has been working on a general history of the Human Genome Project and its explosive consequences.