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  • Edwin H. Land

Edwin H. Land

1909 - 1991

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Edwin Land is mostly known as the founder of the Polaroid company and the instant camera (and second only to Thomas Edison in the number of patents granted). But Land was not only an inventor: he was also a genuine scientist, developing over three decades the Retinex theory of color vision with a collaborator, J. McCann. The theory, as its name suggests (a combination of retina and cortex), held that color sensation was the product of calculations, either in the eye (retina) or in the brain (cortex), or both, in which light in each of the three major wavebands were compared.

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Edwin Land also founded in 1980 the Rowland Institute for Science, now part of Harvard University. See "History of the Institute," Rowland Institute for Science, http://www.rowland.harvard.edu/organization/history/index.php" (accessed 02/07/2015)
"The Physiological Explanation of Land's Retinex Theory Prepared by James T. Fulton," A 21st CENTURY PARADIGM DESCRIBING
THE NEURAL SYSTEM, http://sightresearch.net/files/retinex.htm (accessed 02/07/2015)
"Edwin Herbert Land". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2015. Web. 07 Feb. 2015 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/329092/Edwin-Herbert-Land>.
Victor K. McElheny, <i>Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land</i> (Reading, MA: Perseus Books, c1998).
F.W. Campbell, F.R.S.†, "Dr. Edwin H. Land (1909 - 1991), Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 40, 195-219 (1994)., Rowland Institute for Science, http://www2.rowland.harvard.edu/book/edwin-h-land (accessed 02/07/2015)
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