Quick Birdie

Junior, cooperative for once, smiles that incomparable smile. Daddy clicks the camera. Mummy is certain that the little darling, at last, has been caught at his cutest. Then comes the long wait while the drugstore and photofinisher work on the film. When the prints are finally ready, it is obvious that they are neither sharply focused nor skillfully composed.

Every amateur photographer, having suffered this painful anticlimax, knows that he could take better snapshots if he could see the print at once, correct his errors and snap again.

It will be possible soon, says the Polaroid Corp. of Cambridge, Mass. Last week Polaroid's President Edwin H. Land demonstrated his new invention: a camera that takes a picture in the ordinary way, then delivers a finished positive print in less than a minute.

Easy Snapping. For the cameraman, there's no trick to it. He snaps the picture, pulls the film out of the camera, tears it off against a built-in knife edge. A sheet of special paper comes plastered against the face of the film. After 50 seconds it can be peeled away: a finished positive print, only faintly damp.

Behind this simple procedure is a radical innovation. In conventional photography, the light which comes through the lens forms a "latent image" in the silver bromide of the film. A proper chemical "developer" darkens this image by turning its silver bromide into black metallic silver. In the negative, the lightest parts of the scene photographed show up blackest, the dark spots show up lightest. To reverse the negative and get a print, the photofinisher goes through the whole dark-into-light process again.

Inventor Land's speedup process takes all the steps at the same time. An ordinary commercial film with an opaque back is exposed in the usual way. The photographer pulls it out of the camera along with a sheet of special paper. Attached to the paper is a "pod" (containing a viscous chemical mixture) which is broken when it passes two small rollers. The chemicals are spread evenly between film and paper, sticking them closely together (see diagram).

Try Again. As the chemicals go to work, one of them "develops" the latent image in the film, turning its silver bromide into metallic silver. The silver is insoluble and stays put on the negative. But the silver bromide outside the latent image remains soluble. Another chemical in the mixture dissolves it, carries it over to the print paper. There it is broken down into dark metallic silver, deposited on the paper.

When the paper is peeled away, the film has become a negative. The paper is a positive print, ready for Junior's babybook.

Polaroid's 50-second pictures appear to be of good quality, certainly up to amateur standards. The process is not affected by ordinary variations of temperature. The exposure need not be longer than usual, and the photographer need not count his 50 seconds carefully. If a picture does not suit him, he can snap another immediately and hope for better results within the minute.

A special camera is needed to take Land pictures, but not an elaborate or radically different type. Polaroid says that one is being designed for mass production, but does not promise how soon it will hit the market.

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