George Eastman

Entrepreneur

• Born: July 12, 1854
• Birthplace: Waterville, New York
• Died: March 14, 1932
• Place of death: Rochester, New York

American inventor and businessman

Through his introduction to his simple-to-operate roll-film Kodak camera, Eastman made photography accessible to virtually all people. He built the Eastman Kodak Company into the world’s largest photographic manufacturing establishment by dominating world markets and by pioneering in organized industrial research and development.

Areas of achievement Invention and technology, photography, business and industry, philanthropy

Early Life

George Eastman was born in the small, upstate New York town of Waterville. Both his maternal and his paternal ancestors had arrived from England to settle in New England in the 1630’s. From the 1840’s, his father, George W. Eastman, operated a commercial business college in Rochester, New York, and commuted to the family home in Waterville; his mother, Maria Kilbourn, cared for her young son and two older daughters. When George was six years old the family removed to Rochester, and in 1862 his father died. Maria Kilbourn Eastman, a devout Episcopalian, had to support her family by taking in boarders. George sought to assist as he could. After seven or eight years of private and public education, George left school at the age of fourteen to work first in an insurance office and later as a bookkeeper in a bank.

During his formative years, Eastman enjoyed working with tools, kept detailed accounts of his income and expenditures, carefully saved money, and revealed increasing interest in photography as a hobby. By the late 1870’s he began to investigate the new gelatin emulsion dry plates that allowed factory production of photographic plates, unlike the traditional awkward, costly, and time-consuming production of photosensitive plates by each photographer at the site and at the time of taking the photograph. Gelatin emulsions were to simplify and revolutionize the practice of photography in the 1880’s, and Eastman, as a serious amateur, came to photography with this new perspective.

The short, trim Eastman was austere and shy in personal relations and no doubt incorporated values and sought to convey a demeanor that was fostered both within a home where his father had operated a business college and in the banking community where he worked. He also already displayed what was to be this bachelor’s lifelong devotion to his mother and to her memory.

Life’s Work

The young Eastman brought to photographic production a combination of strong interest in technology and science, a deep commitment to business values (especially the role of impersonal market forces), great personal ambition, and a deep-seated need to be independent and in control of his environment. He entered on commercial production of photographic plates about 1880, while still employed at the bank. He entered with a strategy, perhaps encouraged by his good friend, the Rochester patent attorney and inventor George Selden. Eastman invented and patented a plate-coating machine. He sought to raise capital for his American enterprise by selling rights for its use in Great Britain. While he did not succeed in raising capital in this way, it is clear that from the beginning he pursued sophisticated technical-marketing-financial plans.

In 1881, Henry Strong, an older gentleman with a successful buggy whip factory, joined in partnership with Eastman in the dry plate business. While the company was initially successful, it soon became clear that Eastman had no particular marketing advantage and that prospects for growth were dim. In 1884, William Hall Walker, a local camera maker, joined Eastman and Strong and a small number of other local investors in forming a company to pursue not only production of dry plates but also development of a new film system of photography. Walker and Eastman invented a commercial paperfilm system, but it did not attract extensive usage by professional photographers the principal photographers of the day.

In 1887, Eastman reconceived the market for the tightly patented system: amateurs rather than professionals. By making the camera very simple to use and by providing factory service for developing and printing the photographs, Eastman made it possible for the average person to pursue photography for the first time. The simple camera was named the “Kodak” (a word created by Eastman, who used the letter “k” twice in honor of the “k” in Kilbourn, his mother’s family name) and was first marketed in mid-1888. Eastman and his emulsion-maker, Henry M. Reichenbach, soon developed thin celluloid film to replace the paper film that was first used.

Employing the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest” the Kodak camera system of film photography transformed photography and the industry. Having an international perspective from the beginning, Eastman successfully marketed film photography to the world. By the mid-1890’s, the success of the product attracted many imitators, and Eastman’s patent strategy began to falter. He then employed people to work full-time, constantly making improvements in cameras and film so that every year the company would have improved products an additional strategy to place the company ahead of the competition and therefore capable of dominating the market.

By the turn of the century, Eastman sought to control not only film photography but plate cameras, photographic print papers, and motion-picture film as well. Like many American and European entrepreneurs of that era, he began to buy out competing companies and to acquire exclusive control of key materials or technical processes. These tactics, along with the company’s strategy of continuous product innovation, soon made Eastman Kodak the overwhelmingly dominant photographic company in American and also in many markets worldwide.

Three challenges soon faced Eastman as he ran his company: antitrust action from the government, concern that some other company might develop a commercially successful color film, and concern that other companies might attract key employees from Eastman Kodak and thereby gain valuable trade secrets. During the 1910’s and early 1920’s, Eastman and his attorneys fought the antitrust issue especially trying to defend Eastman’s earlier acquisition of competing dry plate, camera, and photographic paper companies. Eastman finally sold some of these companies as part of a consent decree.

Eastman’s concern that some European company or inventor would develop an important color process preoccupied him throughout the 1910’s. He had full-time people in Europe whose primary responsibility was to seek out such possibilities, When, in 1911, during a tour of European facilities, he visited a German chemical company with a large research laboratory and an officer of the company asked Eastman about his laboratory, Eastman was embarrassed to admit that he did not have one. Within days of this event, he began planning such a facility and finding a suitable director for it. In 1912, the Eastman Kodak research laboratory was established with C. E. Kenneth Mees as director. The laboratory, charged with the responsibility for the future of photographic science and technology at Kodak, was the culmination of Eastman’s career-long strategy of seeking to maintain Eastman Kodak control of the market through dominance of photographic technology. It also met the need to pursue color photography and to give Eastman something further to boast about.

Eastman also addressed the potential loss of employees by introducing a number of highly innovative employee benefit programs. Early in the 1910’s he established a profit-sharing program for employees, and during the next decade he pioneered many other benefit programs to many of which he personally contributed. These benefit programs also developed at a time that he began an active but low-profile philanthropic program. During the 1910’s and 1920’s, he donated more than $100 million dollars to educational, medical, and civic organizations. Especially notable were his contributions to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Rochester, and the Hampton and Tuskegee institutes. The Eastman School of Music, which is a part of the University of Rochester, is one of the few organizations to which he contributed that carries his name.

Significance

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Eastman’s personal education and interest in music and art grew. An Anglophile, he actively supported U.S. involvement in World War I. He also promoted progressive municipal reforms largely based on arguments of efficiency. Not a member of an established church, not a highly sociable person, not involved deeply in national politics (he was a Republican) and business circles, he devoted himself largely to his company, his city, and his philanthropies. Despite a certain isolation and insularity, he participated in international movements that created large-scale business corporations, wedded science and technology to many of them through institutionalized research and development, and sought to create a new relationship between employee and employer.

The Eastman Kodak Company’s combination of high-quality and reliable film and a continuing stream of improved cameras made the Kodak trademark of enormous value. Its catchy slogan “You press the button, we do the rest,” became recognized around the world, and the Kodak name is synonymous with snapshot photography. Indeed, the still-popular phrase “Kodak moment” means a moment that seems made for a photograph.

Eastman built his life and his company on independence and control. At the age of seventy-seven, as his body and mind began to fail him, he took his own life, leaving a simple note that read, “My work is done.”

Bibliography

Ackerman, Carl W. George Eastman. 1930. Reprint. Clifton, N.J.: A. M. Kelley, 1973. This book-length biography quotes extensively from Eastman’s correspondence, tells a good heroic story, details his philanthropy, but is not very critical or analytical. Eastman himself is reputed to have helped to edit this authorized biography.

Brayer, Elizabeth. George Eastman: A Biography. Reprint. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2006. A scholarly biography that is meticulously researched.

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. This major study of the history of American business emphasizes the changing economic environment and the changing role of corporate managers as large-scale enterprise emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. It provides an excellent context for understanding Eastman’s business career.

Coe, Brian. The Birth of Photography: The Story of the Formative Years, 1800-1900. New York: Taplinger, 1977. This popular history of early photography includes discussion of Eastman’s influence. Many striking photographs in the book highlight the changes in photography from 1840 to 1900.

Jenkins, Reese V. “George Eastman and the Coming of Industrial Research in America.” In Technology in America: A History of Individuals and Ideas, edited by Carroll W. Pursell, Jr. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. This brief essay describes Eastman’s approach to research and development and how his technical strategy changed as his company grew. It describes the establishment of the Eastman Kodak research laboratory and the cultural context out of which this institution emerged.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Images and Enterprise: Technology and the American Photographic Industry, 1839-1925. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. This detailed history of the entire American photographic industry provides both an analytical account of Eastman’s business career and the context within which it occurred. Emphasizing business and economic aspects, it does not place Eastman or his photographic developments in a larger social and cultural context.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Technology and the Market: George Eastman and the Origins of Mass Amateur Photography.” Technology and Culture 16 (January, 1975): 1-19. This brief but detailed account of the invention and introduction of the Kodak camera during the late 1880’s emphasizes technological, economic, and business considerations and argues that Eastman’s technical innovations created amateur photography as it is known today.

Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present. Rev. and enlarged ed. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982. This outstanding general history of photography, a classic in the field, provides an excellent art-historical perspective but places less emphasis on the technical, economic, and social dimensions. Having been frequently revised, this book is well written and handsomely illustrated.

West, Nancy Martha. Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Part of the Cultural Frames, Framing Culture series, this book examines how the Eastman Kodak Company, Kodak cameras, and snapshot photography have shaped American culture through marketing and advertising especially. Highly recommended.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: 1905-1907: Baekeland Invents Bakelite; 1907: Lumières Develop Color Photography; 1913: Edison Shows the First Talking Pictures; February 21, 1927: Eastman Kodak Is Found to Be in Violation of the Sherman Act.

1941-1970: February 21, 1947: Land Demonstrates the Polaroid Camera.