Dog Urine Makes for Better Sunglasses!

The polarizing filter was invented by Dr. Edwin Land between his Freshman and Sophmore years at Harvard.

It seems Land came across the the work of Dr. William Herapath who, back in 1852, had a pupil by the name of Phelps who discovered that if you fed a dog iodine and quinine, it caused it’s urine to form strange green crystals which polarized light.

Now, I will set aside the obvious question like: "Phelps, what the hell were you doing feeding that dog iodine and quinine, and why have you been looking through its pee crystals at the sunlight?" Some questions, I have decided, you really do not want to know the answer to!

In any case, it seems Dr. Herapath named the iodoquinine sulfate crystals after himself (about par for the course, eh?) and after spending several years trying to grow a really large crystal of "Herapathite" (no doubt by using a really big dog), he gave up on the project.

Land, decided to try a different tack, and in 1929, he invented a way to take many small crystals of Herapathite, embed them in transparent nitrocellulose polymer film, and get them to line up by using magnets. The result was a film that polarized light. The first polarizing sunglasses were born!

Later, a shortage of quinine led Land to develop an alternative method of making polarizing lenses using sheets of a polyvinyl alcohol.

Edwin Land, of course, went on to make the Polaroid camera. Polaroids, of course, have already been tossed on to the ash tip of history -- made obsolete by the rise of digital photography. However polaroid lenses -- and their dog-urine steeped history -- live on! And without sunglasses, would we have had Wayfarers? And without Wayfarer sunglasses, would we have the Blue Brothers? I think not!


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