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Polaroid and Kodak had a long relationship that dated back to the early 1930s, when Kodak became the first significant customer for Land’s plastic polarizer material. In the early 1940s, Land began the research program that led to the 1948 introduction of the very first one-step photography camera and film system. (It required the photographer to time the processing, and then peel the positive print away from the negative.) Land’s colleagues at Kodak, despite not knowing what he was up to, supplied photographic chemicals for those experiments.

When Polaroid finally had a product ready for commercialization, it was Kodak to whom Land turned for help in the manufacture of its film. Through the following decades, Kodak continued to work with Polaroid on each new one-step film that it developed, from sepia to black-and-white, and then to color. It helped with the transition of Polaroid’s technology from the laboratory to a manufacturing facility, and produced the negative components Polaroid incorporated into each of its one-step films.

In 1968, with Polaroid now established as one of Kodak’s top corporate customers, Land showed Kodak executives the prototype for a new generation of Polaroid film, seeking its help with its commercialization. For the first time, the photograph would emerge from the camera and require no further manipulation—one could simply hold it and watch it develop in the light before your eyes. Gone were the various steps required in all previous one-step systems—no more timing, no more peeling-apart, no more print-coating, no more print-mounting. Land enthusiastically told his Kodak colleagues that he believed this new system would revolutionize photography forever.

The Kodak executives took his claims seriously. Following the meeting, Kodak conducted marketing analyses that showed, if Land was correct, Kodak could lose billions of dollars of sales in the coming years because of Polaroid’s new system. This realization changed Kodak’s attitude forever. As a result, Kodak demanded that, in exchange for its help in bringing the new film to market, Polaroid finally issue the licenses that would allow Kodak to enter the instant photography market with competitive products sold in its iconic yellow boxes.

But Polaroid had regularly refused to grant licenses to Kodak, given the disparity in size between the two companies and Kodak’s near-complete dominance of the retail photography world. When Kodak didn’t budge on its demand, Polaroid was forced to go it alone. It built new facilities to manufacture, for the first time, every element of its film. Finally, in 1972, Polaroid introduced its SX-70 camera and film combination, a system that delivered on Land’s initial intent to give the photographer the instant gratification of holding a photograph in their hands seconds after the shutter snapped. Time called it “a stunning technological achievement,” and Life declared that it was “a daring challenge to Kodak for supremacy in the $4 billion-a-year U.S. photo industry.”