A friend of mine tells a similar story about his parents having a meal with a guy named Edwin who wanted them to invest in a particular chemical process he was experimenting with. They turned him down, and yes, it worked out to be Edwin Land, playing with what would eventually become the Polaroid process. They too threw away some money that day.
Land worked at the Naval Photographic Center in Washington (DC) when he was developing the process. He tried to get a lot of people there to buy in. When I was a Navy photographer in the '60's I knew several people who'd wished they had.
