George Eastman. “The Father of Kodak”

Today, as many as 80% of all consumers capture photos with a digital camera or camcorder and some four in ten (40%) only use a digital camera or camcorder. This compares to almost half (45%) of consumers who use their smartphone to capture photos or video.

A lot of this wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for one man. That man would be George Eastman, and I will explain why. George Eastman invented the Kodak Camera in 1888.

Eastman was born on July 12, 1854, in Waterville, New York. George Sr. had started a small business school, Eastman Commercial College, in Rochester, where he moved the family in 1860. But he died suddenly when Eastman was eight. This tragedy alone would alter Eastman’s course for the rest of his life. He would take jobs to help take care of himself, his mother, and his two older siblings (one of whom was in a wheelchair because of Polio).

A planned trip to Santo Domingo in 1878 would change the course of his life. He wanted to document the trip but discovered how impossible it was because of the costs and size of the photography equipment needed to be used on the trip. He would end up not going because of this issue.

Determined to make photography less cumbersome, Eastman set out to invent a camera that would be smaller and easier to use. He would be shown seeing a formula for a “dry plate” emulsion in a British publication, and getting tutelage from two local amateur photographers, Eastman would formulate a gelatin-based paper film and a device for coating dry plates.

Eastman would quit his job at a Bank he was working at in April 1880 and began to build his fledging company. 5 years later with his friend and confidant William Hall Walker, a camera inventor. The two would file a patent application for a roll holder device that the two had invented. This device would make the camera smaller and cheaper.

He would come up with the name Kodak in 1888 that would be accompanied with the tagline, “You press the button, we do the rest”. This would mean that the film was sent to the company after the 100 exposures on the roll of film had been used; they developed it and sent it back to the customer. Later in 1889 Eastman would hire chemist Henry Reichenbach and have him develop a type of flexible film that could be more easily inserted into the cameras. Thomas Edison would also learn about this and use it in his work towards creating “Motion picture capturing”. This would alone help Kodak’ stock rise.

When Eastman’s camera was finally presented, “The Brownie one” and charged only $1. The photography market was never the same again. His creation would establish what is known as the “amateur photography market”, and it is still going strong today.

Despite his company essentially becoming a monopoly for many years, Eastman was not your typical corporate industrialist. He was one of the first American industrialists to embrace and implement the concept of employee profit sharing in the United States. His generosity would also extend beyond his own business, as he gave to the struggling Mechanics Institute of Rochester, which became the Rochester Institute of Technology, as well as M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

It would be estimated that Eastman contributed more than $100 million of his wealth for philanthropic purposes during his lifetime. Too bad that isn’t practice much in today’s world.

As a photographer myself. I can’t help but admire him. Without him I probably wouldn’t have become a photographer today. The only thing about this is that I had no idea who he was until I started studying the world history of Photography itself. Learning about snapshots and pictorialism. His contribution alone has helped amateurs like me discover art with just a click and the ability to develop before the iPhone came to.

Below is some of my work I have posted on my Instagram. enjoy