- David Senra — Covered on Founders episode #40 (2018), read alongside Instant: The Story of Polaroid; Edwin Land is a figure he has returned to across many later episodes. source ↗
The first full-scale biography of Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid and inventor of instant photography, written with Land's cooperation before his death. McElheny traces Land's path from a boy who kept a physics textbook under his pillow to the holder of 535 patents, driven by the question his three-year-old daughter asked on a family vacation: why can't she see the photograph right away? The book covers Land's obsessive research style, his Cold War intelligence work, and the SX-70 triumph that defined Polaroid's golden age.
David Senra read this biography for Founders episode #40 (2018) and has returned to Land's story across many later episodes. Land's defining trait was what Senra calls the refusal to accept that something is impossible — the same quality that drove him to break into Columbia's lab at night as a teenager to pursue polarized light. Steve Jobs called Land "a national treasure," and Senra treats him as the archetype of the inventor-founder who cannot separate his identity from his product. The book also lives on the shelf of the Edwin Land founder entry in this library, where it is the primary source for Land's early life and Columbia research.