Talk:Edwin H. Land
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As I recall, he was once in Guiness Book of World Records as the richest scientist in the world. Later, as the person who lost the most money in the preceding year (as a result of decline in stock prices following introduction of instant movie process). Anyone recall this? If true, it could be interesting addition to page.
Also, his nickname was "Din".
The nickname came from his mispronunciation of his own name as a child. He insisted that people call him "Din", but many refused to, simply because they felt uncomfortable addressing someone so important and accomplished in such a familiar way.
The SX-70 was originally called the "Alladin" camera, but Land changed the name, because he didn't want the obvious play on words -- "a la Din".
I changed the description of his principal invention to recognize the facts that it wasn't the first system of instant photography (the daguerreotype was!), nor the only system (tintype, Ambrotype), and that there has been previous systems of in-camera processing, all of which were "wet". Land's genius lay in figuring out how to make it all work in way where the "mechanism" was invisible to the user.
WilliamSommerwerck (talk) 17:05, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
[edit] No citations?
It strikes me that there are a lot of statements in this article that need citations. I'll go through and tag them. --ChrisWinter 22:35, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Wikimyths?
After I saw the question of "what year?" for the Guinness cite, I checked through old editions of the Guinness book (pre-1980) and there was never a category for "richest scientist". I wouldn't have been surprised if the McWhorter brothers had set aside a category for "richest set of twins", but richest scientist? One person's suggestion that it might be interesting "if true" was picked up by someone who didn't worry about whether it was true. Mandsford 02:27, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
What's scary is that if you google "richest scientist", you come up with 22 references, all of them to Edwin Land, all of them seem to be drawn straight from this article! It reminds me of Mencken's history of the bathtub. Maybe a new category can be established "Wikimythia" for urban legends that originated with Wiki?
