Christopher Bonanos contributed an interesting Op-Ed to The New York Times on Steve Jobs’ true inspiration, Edwin H. Land. Land was a scientist, inventor, the co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation, and the creator of the Polaroid instant camera. From the article:

Land, in his time, was nearly as visible as Jobs was in his. In 1972, he made the covers of both Time and Life magazines, probably the only chemist ever to do so. (Instant photography was a genuine phenomenon back then, and Land had created the entire medium, once joking that he’d worked out the whole idea in a few hours, then spent nearly 30 years getting those last few details down.) And the more you learn about Land, the more you realize how closely Jobs echoed him.

How did Jobs speak of Land? From his 1985 interview in Playboy:

You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company—which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of. So Land, at 75, went off to spend the remainder of his life doing pure science, trying to crack the code of color vision. The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be—not an astronaut, not a football player—but this.

Does this sound familiar? The parallels between Land and Jobs are remarkable. Both were pushed out of the companies they co-founded, and both understood the combined strength of art and science.

“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.” — Steve Jobs, March 2nd, 2011