George Eastman and the rise of Eastman Kodak

If you have a snapshot of your great-aunt Gladys from 1940, you can thank George Eastman, the father of consumer cameras.

Self-educated and from a modest background, George Eastman created one of the world’s great technology companies, Eastman Kodak, and put cameras and photographs into the hands of everyday people in everyday situations.

Eastman’s father died when he was young, forcing George to leave school to support his mother and siblings. Early on, Eastman founded a photography business and pursued photography as an entrepreneur and a passion project. “What we do during our working hours,” Eastman later said, “determines what we have; what we do in our leisure hours determines what we are.”

But Eastman’s leisure hours earned him a vast fortune and changed how we think about leisure in the process. He developed the idea of a film roll in his kitchen in 1884 at age 34. The roll made it possible to take black-and-white pictures one after another in sequence. In 1888, he introduced the Kodak camera, making the film roll easy to use. The film was pre-loaded with the original Kodak camera and allowed the user to snap 100 photos before mailing the camera back to Eastman Kodak. The company would process the photos, reload the camera and send it all back to the photographer. It inspired the company slogan: You push the button, we do the rest. Kodak cameras rank among the earliest examples of modern subscription services and products in many ways.

The name Kodak referred not only to the camera but also to the film. Eastman invented the word with his mother using scrabble tiles. He thought the letter K was strong and wanted his film to have a short, pleasant-sounding, easily remembered the name: Kodak.

In 1935, Eastman Kodak introduced Kodachrome film, and suddenly, the world was documented in color.

Perhaps a bit prophetically, Eastman argued that “The world is moving, and a company that contents itself with present accomplishments soon falls behind.” Once a dominant player in the camera and film market, Eastman Kodak has fallen on hard times in the 21st century. The rise of mobile phones and digital cameras spelled doom for traditional film cameras, but photography was at the cutting edge of technology when Kodak was founded in the 19th century. And George Eastman made cameras and photography a part of everyday life.

Eastman never married and spent his early life trying to support his mother and siblings. By the time he reached his late 30s, he was on the way to becoming a wealthy leader of the industry, a philanthropist, a leader in establishing worker benefits and profit sharing, and one of the first to promote a woman to an executive position. In 1932, in great pain from a spinal disease, Eastman ended his own life after writing to friends that his work was done and “Why wait?”