Page 62 - Forbes - Asia (June 2018)

FORBES ASIA
FROM THE VAULT

Slow to Develop: June 15, 1969

BY ABRAM BROWN

SHUTTERBUGS PRIZED Polaroids for their
instantaneousness. But the company’s founder,
Edwin Land, a Harvard-educated physicist, certainly
did not conduct business at lashbulb speed. He had
started Polaroid in 1937 and carefully built it up to
more than $240 million in sales (about $1.6 billion in
2018 dollars) by slowly reducing the bulk and price of
his cameras. he Polaroid Swinger, released in 1965,
was a breakthrough hit, selling 5 million units in two
years. (It cost $19.95, roughly $136 today.) Polaroid
had also experimented with photocopiers, but the
designs didn’t impress Land, and he steadfastly refused
to release them to the marketplace. “We do not want to
do what every Tom, Dick and Xerox can do,” said Land,
who at the time possessed a fortune equivalent to more
than $4 billion today. “We proceed from basic science
through applied science to highly desirable products.”
Polaroid’s plodding pace would ultimately lead to
its demise as it was let behind in the consumer shit to
digital cameras. It iled for bankruptcy in 2001, a decade
ater Land died, at age 81. Polaroid has since been resur-
rected, and in a bid to attract the kinds of customers who
have locked anew to vinyl records, last year it introduced a
$99.99 version of its instant-ilm camera.

NOTABLE AND
NEWSWORTHY
Wily Wyly FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK
At 34, Sam Wyly was already Pesticide Pestilence
displaying the empire-building In the 1950s Malcolm Forbes had lunch in Nassau, the
strategy that would eventually Bahamas, with an entrepreneur named James Rand,
make him a billionaire for a who wouldn’t touch some ofered fruit. Rand wasn’t in
time: Buy up small companies the chemicals business—he made typewriters—but after
across a given industry and turn watching his wife once fall ill from pesticide-laden food, he
them around. By the summer assured Malcolm that “we [are] all slowly being poisoned
of ’69 he had nabbed his latest by pesticide.” Malcolm recounted the story in a 1969 column
acquisition: Gulf Insurance. that questioned why the U.S. hadn’t yet banned DDT. TOM PENNINGTON/FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM/MCT/GETTY IMAGES; CAMERIQUE/GETTY IMAGES

FAST-FORWARD AMAZING AD
Reel Problems Land of Machines
1969: Edgar Bronfman Sr.’s MGM was still struggling and Honeywell
to overcome silver-screen flops from years prior, Honeywell was determined
such as The Mutiny on the Bounty. to make its 14-year-old
2018: Four years after Edgar Sr.’s death and almost computer division a success.
two decades after his son Edgar Jr. committed Just a few weeks later,
his own entertainment blunder—selling the clan’s its machines would help
Seagram Cos. to Vivendi—the only Bronfman on astronauts reach the moon.
Forbes’ billionaires list is Edgar Sr.’s brother, Charles.
60 | FORBES ASIA JUNE 2018