Eastman Kodak Company

Product Details

Historical Context

Eastman Kodak was incorporated in 1901 as the successor to a business established in Rochester in 1880 by George Eastman, who perfected the newly developed method of making photographic dry plates. Before 1880, photographers had to coat a plate with fresh, wet chemicals each time they wanted to take a picture. Eastman developed a machine that mechanically produced dry, precoated plates, and he set up the company that later would become Eastman Kodak to sell his plates.

Four years later Eastman introduced roll film, and in 1888 he introduced the Kodak camera, the first camera that was simple and portable enough to be used by large numbers of amateur photographers. The camera was sold with film sealed inside, and the whole unit was mailed back to Rochester for film processing and replacement. In 1900 Eastman introduced the less-expensive Brownie, a simple box camera with a removable film container, so that the whole unit no longer needed to be sent back to the plant.

In following years the company continued to produce innovations for the amateur photographer. Kodak was the first to make home-movie equipment and an easy-to-use colour slide film, Kodachrome. In the 1960s the company introduced the Instamatic series of still and movie cameras, all of which used cartridge-loaded film. The Disc camera series, introduced in 1982, was a technologically advanced group of cameras that could automatically activate the use of the flash, if necessary, in addition to adjusting the focus and advancing the film. In 1984 the company entered the video market by introducing an 8-millimetre video camera system and videocassette tapes.

By the early 21st century, facing significant declines in the consumer market for cameras and other products related to film photography, Kodak placed new emphasis on digital photography products. The company remained a leading supplier of photographic films, papers, and chemicals for professional photographers and also manufactured motion-picture film, single-use and other consumer digital cameras, aerial surveillance films, and equipment for the graphic communications industry into the 21st century. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in January 2012 and announced soon after that it would no longer manufacture digital cameras and some other digital imaging products.

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