February 21, 1947: Edwin Land Demonstrates the Polaroid Land Camera

This is the Polaroid Highlander Model 80A,
manufactured from 1957 to 1959. Photograph
 is by John Kratz, and is released under the
Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 2.0 Generic license. 

It was quite an innovation, a camera that could develop its own film while you waited. In fact, Edwin Land and his staff weren't quite sure it would take off. The first production run was of only 60 units, and 57 of them were offered at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston, just before Christmas.

It was incorrectly supposed that those 57 units would be in stock for a long time -- at least long enough for them to figure out how many to manufacture for the second run.

The cameras sold out on the first day.