Captains of Industry (ep19) George Eastman

George Eastman (July 12, 1854 – March 14, 1932) was an American entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and helped to bring the photographic use of roll film into the mainstream. After a decade of experiments in photography, he patented and sold a roll film camera, making amateur photography accessible to the general public for the first time. Working as the treasurer and later president of Kodak, he oversaw the expansion of the company and the film industry.

Eastman was a major philanthropist, establishing the Eastman School of Music, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, and schools of dentistry and medicine at the University of Rochester and Eastman Dental Hospital at University College London, and making large contributions to the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), the construction of several buildings at the second campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on the Charles River, and Tuskegee University and Hampton University, two historically black universities in the South. With interests in improving health, he provided funds for clinics in London and other European cities to serve low-income residents.

In his final two years, Eastman was in intense pain caused by a disorder affecting his spine. On March 14, 1932, he shot himself in the heart, leaving a note which read, "To my friends: my work is done. Why wait?"

Eastman is regarded as one of the most influential and well-known residents of Rochester, New York. He has been commemorated on several college campuses and the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and the George Eastman Museum has been designated a National Historic Landmark.

Founding of Kodak

An advertisement from 1888 of the first Kodak camera
While working as a bank clerk in the 1870s, Eastman became interested in photography. After receiving lessons from George Monroe and George Selden, he developed a machine for coating dry plates in 1879. In 1881, he founded the Eastman Dry Plate Company with Henry Strong to sell plates, with Strong as company president and Eastman as treasurer, where he handled most executive functions.[8] Around the same time, he began experiments to create a flexible film roll that could replace plates altogether. In 1885, he received a patent for a film roll, and then focused on creating a camera to use the rolls. In 1888, he patented and released the Kodak camera ("Kodak" being a word Eastman created). It was sold loaded with enough roll film for 100 exposures. When all the exposures had been made, the photographer mailed the camera back to the Eastman company in Rochester, along with $10. The company would process the film, make a print of each exposure, load another roll of film into the camera, and send the camera and the prints to the photographer.

The separation of photo-taking from the difficult process of film development was novel and made photography more accessible to amateurs than ever before, and the camera was immediately popular with the public. By August 1888, Eastman was struggling to meet orders, and he and his employees soon had several other cameras in development. The rapidly-growing Eastman Dry Plate Company was reorganized as the Eastman Company In 1889, and then incorporated as Eastman Kodak in 1892.