The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way by Max Gunther

Author:Max Gunther
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harriman House

4 Originally published in True magazine under the title “Hard-Nosed Gambler in the Plane Game”. Copyright © 1966 by Fawcett Publications, Inc., and C.P. Gilmore. Reprinted with permission. [return to text]

12. The Technology Route: The Specialist’s Approach

If you had bought the stock of Polaroid Corporation at the right time in the late 1930s and sold it at the right time in the late 1960s, you would have multiplied your money by more than 2000. To put it another way, every $100 you invested would have grown in some 30 years to over $200,000.

That is the kind of company Wall Street’s dreams are made on. Speculators continually comb the new-issues market to find a company that will repeat that monumental performance. They hunt eternally for a scruffy little company somewhere out in the boondocks, a company nobody loves today but everybody will love in the 1990s. Some highly knowledgeable hunters who have been engaged in this search over the years say the way to go about it is to look for a man, not a company. Look for a technical innovator, a man with an idea. Then invest in him, no matter how uninviting his company’s balance sheet may look at the moment.

The first wave of investors who put their money into Polaroid were doing just that. The infant company had little to offer in the way of immediate cash returns. But it did have Edwin H. Land.

Unlike Bill Lear, Land is a specialist. He has spent his adult life studying light, how it affects materials, how they affect it, how the eye reacts to it, how these effects can be put to use. This has been his absorbing passion ever since he left college. It was so large a passion, in fact, that he left college without graduating. Like Bill Lear (and like many other men in our gallery), he was so impatient to get started that he couldn’t bear to spend any more time in formal education. The thought-provoking result is that Edwin Land, acknowledged the world over to be among its most brilliant living scientists, doesn’t even have a college diploma.

One of the most comprehensive studies of this brilliant, complex and enormously rich man was written a little more than a decade ago by Fortune reporter Francis Bello. Bello’s story covers the most interesting parts of Land’s life, from Polaroid’s infancy in 1937 to its glorious adulthood as one of the hottest growth companies in Wall Street’s history. After Bello has finished, we’ll briefly update Land’s fortunes to the present time.

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