George Eastman and Kodak: You Press the Button, We Do the Rest

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In the 1870s, taking a photograph meant hauling glass plates, toxic chemicals, and a dark tent into the field. George Eastman, a bank clerk from Rochester, found the equipment unbearable and began experimenting with dry plates in his mother's kitchen in 1880. This episode follows his progress from the Eastman Dry Plate Company to a roll holder, a paper film, and finally the transparent nitrocellulose film patented in 1889 with chemist Henry Reichenbach.

The 1888 Kodak camera turned that chemistry into a mass habit. It was a leather covered box with no viewfinder, sold for 25 dollars and preloaded with 100 exposures. Customers mailed the whole camera to Rochester with a 10 dollar fee and got back prints and a reloaded camera. Eastman then built a global empire on film sales, vertical integration, and a tightly controlled workforce, before failing health led him to end his own life at his home in Rochester.

Eastman invented the word Kodak with his mother using an anagram set. He wanted a name that was short, impossible to mispronounce, and unlike any existing word, and he favored the letter K.
To widen the market he launched the Kodak Girl advertising campaign and, in 1900, the Brownie camera, marketed directly to children.
In 1908 he made Kodak the sole supplier of raw film to the Motion Picture Patents Company formed by Thomas Edison and major producers.
When World War I disrupted chemical supplies, he bought a hardwood distillation plant in Tennessee to make his own solvents. It grew into the Eastman Chemical Company.
His profit sharing, compensation fund, and discounted stock for employees were designed in part to keep unions out, while his hiring excluded African Americans, Catholics, and Jewish people.

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