Eastman Kodak[

EASTMAN KODAK[1]

1. The Beginning

Eastman, a genius and high school dropout, invented a dry-plate process and established (1880) a factory at Rochester, N.Y., for making dry photographic plates. The Eastman Dry Plate Company became Eastman Kodak in 1892. George Eastman came up with the name Kodak himself, after experimenting with many names starting and ending in K, which he considered to be a “strong, incisive kind of letter”. Kodak is now a world renowned company, which ranks as a premier multinational corporation and one of the 25 largest companies in the United States.

George Eastman was born in Waterville, New York on July 12, 1854 and moved with his family to Rochester, New York in 1859. He dropped out of school in 1868, at the death of his father. He was poor, but even as a young man, he took it upon himself to support his mother and two sisters, one of whom was severely handicapped.

He began his business career as a 14-year old office boy in an insurance company and followed that with work as a clerk in a local bank at age 19. He studied accounting at night to be able to advance in his job.

His passion for photography began with the purchase of his first camera in 1878. The invention of the dry-plate process took one year and many sleepless nights trying different formulas. According to his mother, sometimes he was too tired to undress and slept on the kitchen floor. In 1879 he filed first patent for a machine that coated dry photographic plates and founded the Eastman Dry Plate Company.

He didn't concentrate on perfecting lenses and trying to rival sophisticated European makers of photo equipment. Instead, he developed the Brownie, a box camera that went on the market in 1900 with an all-American price tag of $1. A roll of film went for 15 cents. With the slogan "you press the button, we do the rest", George Eastman put the first simple camera into the hands of a world of consumers. In so doing, he made what had been a cumbersome and...