TimelineKodak camera
Kodak camera
The wooden box that took photography away from the professionals
George Eastman did not build the best camera of 1888. He built the first one a shopkeeper could be trusted with, and then invented the business that would develop the film.
A camera with no viewfinder
The device Eastman patented in 1888 was not much to look at: a leather-covered wooden box with a fixed-focus lens on the front and no viewfinder at all. Twinned V-shaped sights on the top face were the entire aiming system. To take a picture you pulled a string to set the shutter, pressed a button on the side to fire it, and turned a rotating key on top to wind on. There was no focus ring, no exposure dial, no aperture to choose.
That was the point. Every camera before it had been a professional instrument, and every photograph had been a plate that had to be coated, exposed and developed by someone who knew what they were doing. The Kodak camera was sold preloaded with a roll of film good for 100 exposures. There was nothing to load, nothing to measure, and almost nothing to get wrong.
One hundred photographs, then the post office
The strangest part of the deal was what happened when the roll ran out. You did not open the camera. You posted it, whole, back to the Eastman company in Rochester, New York, along with $10. The company developed the roll, printed every exposure, loaded a fresh roll into the same camera and sent it back with the prints.
That round trip is the real invention. Selling a camera is a one-off transaction; selling camera plus film plus processing, forever, is a subscription. Eastman understood which of the two he was in, and built the company around film rather than hardware. Orders were already outrunning production by August 1888, and the business would be reincorporated as the Eastman Company in 1889 and as Eastman Kodak in 1892.
“You press the button, we do the rest”
The slogan, introduced with the camera, is one of the most efficient pieces of marketing copy ever written, because it describes the product so exactly. It also marks a genuine change in who photography was for. Separating the taking of a picture from the making of one turned a technical trade into a pastime, and made amateurs the largest market in photography almost overnight.
The separation of photo-taking from the difficult process of film development was novel and made photography more accessible to amateurs than ever before.
A word invented for the alphabet
“Kodak” means nothing, which is precisely why it was chosen. Eastman wanted a name that was short, easy to pronounce and unlike anything already in use. He was fond of the letter K, calling it “a strong, incisive sort of letter,” and worked the name out with his mother Maria using an anagram set. He trademarked it in 1888, and a 1920 advertisement cheerfully admitted the company had made it up “to meet our trademark requirements.”
The film underneath the wood
Housing a camera in a box was trivial. Making it run on roll film was not, and it took years of work before the 1888 launch. Eastman patented a practical film roll holder with William Walker in 1885, patented a paper film he called “American film” the same year, and brought in the chemist Henry Reichenbach to improve it. Their 1889 patent for nitrocellulose film is the direct ancestor of the film stock that the next century of photography, cinema and consumer snapshotting was printed on.
What the little box started
The company the camera built spent most of the twentieth century as photography itself: film, paper, chemicals, projectors, and the phrase “Kodak moment” folding an entire industry into an idiom. Its decline is one of technology's most quoted cautionary tales, and the details are almost too neat. Kodak engineer Steven Sasson built the first self-contained handheld digital camera prototype in 1975, using a 10,000 pixel monochrome CCD from Fairchild. A colleague wrote a report in 1979 predicting that photography would go fully digital by 2010. Executives, wary of competing with computer hardware firms, declined to bet the company on it. Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2012 and emerged in September 2013.
Set beside that, the wooden box of 1888 looks less like a camera and more like an argument. It won because it was easy, cheap and forgiving of its user, and because the money was in the film. Every phone camera in the world still follows the same script: make the capturing so simple that nobody thinks about it, and charge for what happens afterwards.