In 1972, scientist and Polaroid co-founder Dr. Edwin H. Land released the SX-70 collapsible instant camera, which featured a new type of self-developing film that required nothing of a photographer beyond a point and a click. In the October 27 issue of Life that year, Land unveiled his new invention and opined on the nature of creativity. In his description of the birth of the first Polaroid camera in the 1940s, he offers a pretty great explanation about the creative process in general. An excerpt:

Many people are creative but use their competence in ways so trivial that it takes them nowhere. Their kind of creativity is not cumulative. True creativity is characterized by a succession of acts each depending on the one before and suggesting the one after. This kind  of cumulative creativity led to the development of Polaroid photography.

One day when we were vacationing in Santa Fe in 1943 my daughter, Jennifer, who was then 3, asked me why she could not see the picture we had just taken of her. As I walked around that charming town, I undertook the task of solving the puzzle she had set for me.

Within the hour, the camera, the film and the physical chemistry became so clear that with a great sense of excitement I hurried to the place where a friend was staying, to describe to him in detail a dry camera which would give a picture immediately after exposure. In my mind it was so real that I spent several hours on this description.

Four years later we demonstrated the working system to the Optical Society of America. All that we at Polaroid had learned about making polarizers and plastics, and the properties of the viscous liquids, and the preparation of the microscopic crystals smaller than the wavelengths of light was preparation for that day in which I suddenly knew how to make a one-step photographic process. I learned enough about what would work in different fields to be able to design the camera and film in the space of that walk.•

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In 1970, Edwin H. Land gave a tour of the Polaroid company.