A closer look
Polaroid was forced into inventing instant photography entirely because the founder's three-year-old daughter threw a tantrum about having to wait for her vacation pictures to be developed. Edwin Land was taking photos of his kid in 1943 when she innocently demanded to know why she couldn't see the image immediately, prompting him to spend the next several hours mentally designing the complex chemical process needed to make it happen. Her childish impatience basically birthed an entire multi-billion-dollar industry of instant gratification that defined analog photography for the next fifty years. This proves that technological innovation isn't always driven by a noble quest to advance human knowledge, but rather by the desperate need of exhausted parents to stop a toddler from whining
