When I was a wee lad some sixty years ago, cameras had actually been around for quite a while. One hundred and forty years to be exact. Although they didn’t make waves until the late 1800s when George Eastman invented the Kodak camera, or reach the general public until he developed the affordable if a bit boxy Brownie, and really didn’t achieve widespread popularity and use until just after I was born when Edwin Land introduced the Polaroid.
To edify my younger readers, Polaroids were a wonderment because seconds after opening the shutter they spit out a photograph which, after waiting about a minute for the chemical developing to take place, you could peel open to reveal a poorly framed and blurry picture of your family. As long as it wasn’t too big a family. Prior to this revelatory invention, and frankly for many years after, we had to wait weeks then days then hours to have our film developed so we could admire our poorly framed and blurry photos.