EASTMAN, GEORGE
(1854-1932), inventor, manufacturer, and philanthropist. Born at Waterville, New York, Eastman left school at age fourteen to help support his widowed mother and two sisters as an errand boy in a real estate office. He became interested in photography as a youth, and while working as a bookkeeper in a Rochester bank, he perfected a process for making dry plates in his home studio. In 1880, without quitting his job, he established the Eastman Dry Plate Company with partner Henry A. Strong in the loft of a factory building. So rapidly did this business grow that Eastman left the bank to devote himself full-time to the fledgling photography firm in September 1881.
During the next decade, Eastman transformed photography from a laborious and costly art into an easy, inexpensive hobby enjoyed by millions. In 1884, he replaced cumbersome glass plates with a paper-backed roll film which he invented and marketed through the reorganized Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company. Four years later, he introduced the hand-held Kodak; loaded with film sufficient for one hundred photographs, it produced round pictures two and one-half inches in diameter. "You push the button—we do the rest," Eastman advertised. After snapping a hundred pictures, the amateur photographer returned the loaded camera to the factory where the photos were processed and the camera reloaded.
In 1889 Eastman applied for a patent for celluloid film, which provided the foundation for an entirely new and unforeseen industry—moving pictures. Three years later, after developing daylight-loading film, the firm was reorganized as the Eastman Kodak Company; in 1901 it became the Eastman Kodak Company of New Jersey, capitalized at $35 million. To minimize his competition, Eastman bought out many rivals, acquired patent rights from others, and made exclusive contracts with his wholesale and retail dealers. By 1928, the year the company perfected color photography for motion pictures, Eastman Kodak was the largest manufacturer of photographic supplies in the world, producing everything required by amateur, commercial, scientific, and motion picture photographers.
Eastman's phenomenal success was rooted in continuing scientific research, cost-efficient manufacturing methods, and a loyal labor force. He was one of the first American manufacturers to employ full-time research chemists; he pioneered large-scale production at low costs for a world market; and he introduced profit-sharing and stock-option plans for employees. At the time of his death, the company operated manufacturing plants in Rochester, New York, Kingsport, Tennessee, and England, France, Germany, Australia, and Hungary. The main plant at Kodak Park, Rochester, spread over 480 acres and employed nineteen thousand people.
Eastman never married, and his philanthropies, including bequests, totaled more than $75 million. His primary beneficiary was the University of Rochester, to which he contributed $35 million for the Eastman Theater, the School of Music, the School of Medicine and Dentistry, and the College for Women. Lesser sums were donated to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Hampton and Tuskegee institutes. His hobbies included big-game hunting and growing orchids, and he advocated a calendar based on thirteen months of twenty-eight days. Long in poor health, he took his own life at age seventy-seven. The note he left read: "My work is done. Why wait?"
Carl W. Ackerman, George Eastman (1930).
Patricia Condon Johnston
See also Photography.
