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INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS
George Eastman
PRACTICAL PHOTOGRAPHY

George Eastman is responsible for making photography practical, widely available, and more convenient, since his invention made it possible to take a camera anywhere. He was born on July 12, 1854, in the same house in which his father was born in the village of Waterville, New York. When George was five, his family moved to Rochester, New York, where his oldest sibling established the Eastman Commercial College. When the college failed and George’s father died, the family became financially unstable.

George quit school at the age of fourteen to start working to support the family. He had several jobs working at insurance firms and the Rochester Savings Bank, and his pay ranged from three to fifteen dollars per week. When Eastman was twenty‐four, he made plans to take a trip to Santo Domingo. Following a suggestion from a coworker at the bank, Eastman bought a photographic outfit equipped with all the supplies needed for wet‐plate photography. His camera was as big as a sewing machine and required a heavy tripod as a support. He also purchased plate holders, chemicals, tanks, and a tent, all of which were necessary to be able to apply photosensitive emulsion on glass plates, expose the emulsion, and then develop the images before the emulsion dried. This amounted to approximately 50 pounds of equipment. Eastman said that the equipment “was a packhorse load.”

After all this, Eastman did not make the trip, but he was enticed to find an easier way to take pictures. In 1877, after reading in British journals about photographers creating their own dry gelatin emulsions, which meant that even after the plates became dry they were still sensitive to light, Eastman decided he would do the same. Beginning with a formula he obtained from one of the British journals, he worked on creating his own gelatin emulsions almost nonstop. After three years of working in the bank during the day, and experimenting in his mother’s kitchen at night, he came up with a formula for dry plates that worked, and by 1880 he had obtained patents covering both his formula and a machine that prepared large numbers of plates.

Eastman leased a floor of a building in Rochester in April 1880 to begin manufacturing his dry plates for sale. His company prospered and grew, but faced a downturn at least once when plates went bad in the hands of dealers and Eastman recalled them and replaced the faulty plates with good ones. This recall was costly, but it greatly enhanced Eastman’s reputation.

In 1884, Eastman started working on ways to make a photographic film lighter than the dry plates that were backed by glass. His first attempt was to put the photographic emulsion on a flexible backing such as paper, and then load it into a roll holder. Despite some flaws, this development was a huge success. But, Eastman found that imperfections on or in the texture of the paper were transferred to the developed image. He then decided to eliminate this problem by applying a soluble layer of gelatin over the insoluble light‐sensitive gelatin layer. After development, the soluble gelatin layer bearing the image was lifted off, and the insoluble layer was transferred to a sheet of clear gelatin and varnished with collodion, a cellulose mixture that hardened into a rigid, transparent film. His development of transparent roll film and a roll holder resulted in the introduction of the Kodak® Camera in 1888, the first camera built to hold roll film. Film rolls capable of holding 100 pictures were loaded in the camera. After exposure, the entire camera and film were sent back to Eastman’s company, where the film was developed, the camera was reloaded and returned to the customer, all for $25.00.

A year later, Eastman created flexible transparent film, which proved vital to the development of the motion picture industry. In 1892, he established the Eastman Kodak Company at Rochester, New York. In 1900, the Kodak Brownie became the first roll‐film, hand‐held camera.

George Eastman was also very generous with the fortune he earned, donating in excess of $75 million to a multitude of projects. He endowed the Eastman School of Music in 1918 and the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in 1921. He also gave $20 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

On one day in 1924, George Eastman donated $30 million to the University of Rochester, M.I.T., Hampton Institute, and Tuskegee Institute. The latter two were schools for African‐American students, whose education was a particular concern of George Eastman.

Near the end of his life, Eastman became quite ill and became progressively disabled as a result of hardening of the cells in his lower spinal cord. He died at age 77 of his own hand on March 14, 1932.