Mr. Polaroid

Long before the iPhone, another inventive device made it possible to instantly chronicle everyday life: the Polaroid camera. Both the product and the company’s distinctive culture sparked an instant-photography craze and helped shape the model for today’s Silicon Valley tech ethos. The story begins in the fall of 1948 with the debut of the Polaroid Model 95, whose revolutionary ability to deliver a photograph on the spot would transform photography, and eventually the world.

Mr. Polaroid tells the little-known story of the visionary behind the camera, Edwin Land, a Harvard dropout who, decades before the smartphone, imagined “a camera that you would use as often as your pencil or your eyeglasses.” Convinced his company could lead, and even save, the world, Land fueled a saga defined by ambition, brilliance, hubris, and technology, culminating in a billion photographs a year and a rollicking chapter in American innovation.