When was george eastman born

The first figure of note to attempt the goal of interchangeable parts was Eli Whitney. Having seen his attempt to market his cotton gin end in disaster, Whitney turned in to the idea of gun manufacture. At the time, Congress anticipated an attack from Napoleon. Playing on this fear, Whitney was able to initiate the practice of government contracts for arms dealers -- a custom that continues to this day.

The contract was astoundingly generous. Going into effect on June 21, , it called for Whitney to produce 10, muskets, the first 4, of which would be delivered in a year and a half. What made this handsome sum all the more astonishing was the fact that Whitney had almost no knowledge of gunmaking in a time when the best armories were unable to produce more than 5, guns a year.

Whitney set up a factory in East Haven, Connecticut and drove his workers hard, but come his first deadline on September 30, , he had no muskets to show for himself. Indeed, he hadn't even equipped his armory. Thinking quickly, he wrote a letter to Secretary of State Oliver Wolcott, announcing a "new principle" in manufacturing. This principle, he claimed, would revolutionize that arms industry even as it improved the quality of the goods.

In January of , before an audience that included President John Adams and Whitney's old friend, President-elect Thomas Jefferson, Whitney personally showed how he could fit 10 different locks into the same musket using nothing but an ordinary screwdriver. He then did one better and took different locks apart, scrambled their pieces and put them back together "by taking the first pieces which come to hand.

Unfortunately, Whitney's locks were not even remotely interchangeable. As was later discovered, his individual lock components all bore the marks of individually fashioned pieces. Historian Merritt Roe Smith is categorical on the matter: "Whitney must have staged his demonstration with specimens specially prepared for the occasion. Samuel Colt, the inventor of the six-shooter, even teamed up with Eli Whitney, Jr.

But in fact, the real advances were taking place in England while the Americans fiddled. Henry Maudslay grew up around the dockyards of Woolwich, where he made himself useful at an early age by making and filling cartridges for the local arsenal.

At the green age of 13, he caught the eye of the famous locksmith and plumbing genius Joseph Bramah. But Maudslay was too bright to abide another genius very long. When Bramah refused to give him a raise, he struck out on his own. By , Maudslay had set up his own shop and developed a slide rest lathe, which improved on earlier lathes both in the speed and the precision with which it could cut metal. In effect, Maudslay's lathe, which incorporated a blade of crucible steel mounted on accurately-planed triangular beams, allowed him to do work on a large scale while retaining the locksmith's or the clockmaker's precision.

The year found Maudslay in Portsmouth, turning out wooden rigging blocks, which were used largely aboard naval ships to move guns into firing position quickly. At that time, a vessel of the third class required 1, blocks, all of which were made by hand. This was no problem for Maudslay, who could produce , blocks a year. Maudslay's work opened the way for the making of interchangeable parts, and he soon became highly sought after by aspiring engineers. Among his many apprentices was Joseph Whitworth, who developed measuring instruments accurate to a millionth of an inch.

This was a vital step, because interchangeability relied on precisely tooled parts, which naturally had to be measurable in order to be made. Whitworth went on to describe a method for standardizing screw threads in an paper titled "A uniform system of screw-threads. In an era when handmade machinery was still the norm, attempts to apply precision tooling to particular products necessarily came on a case-by-case basis. The most famous example, of course, is Henry Ford's Model T car, which first rolled off his assembly lines in But in fact, George Eastman got there before Ford.

While Eastman recognized early that his profits lay in film sales, he also knew that he would sell no film at all if his cameras did not work.

The Eastman-Walker Roll Holder, introduced in the , showed how well he had considered this problem. Though it contained 17 separate parts, his company was able to handle a high volume of orders from the very beginning. This became even more obvious in , when the roll holder was incorporated in to the Kodak "roll holder breast camera" and sales jumped to 5, units in six months.

Though this product did break down at times, the parts were in fact interchangeable and therefore relatively easy to repair, even as Eastman kept up with sales. After a century of bogus claims, the slogan of at least one American -- Kodak's "You press the button, we do the rest" -- represented more than an empty boast.

Eastman's marketing career essentially began in , when he introduced the Eastman-Walker Roll Holder, which allowed a series of exposures to be advanced through the camera. With this invention, a whole new concept in photography was launched -- a camera anyone could use.

His challenge was to make that concept clear to a public accustomed to thinking of photographic equipment as forbidding and obscure. Eastman's first stroke was perhaps his most brilliant. A brand name, as he saw it, "must mean nothing.

If the name has no dictionary definition, it must be associated only with your product. First used in December , the name caught on like wildfire. In almost no time, Kodak was being used as noun, verb, and adjective alike. People who used the product came to be known as Kodakers, and the letter K became fair game for anyone who could figure out how to incorporate it into a name: Kola, Kristmas, Kolumbus Day.

A bogus Kodak Company set up shop in Florida, and countless others kept Eastman's legal department busy chasing down infringements of the trademark.

The name was an auspicious start, but it was hardly the only strategy that Eastman marshaled. From the very beginning, he recognized that the lifeblood of his business lay in children, who would keep photographers interested long after the novelty of the camera had worn off.

The early Kodak ads show this wisdom at work, as he took pains to depict family events in connection with his product. A one-time amateur painter, he even showed a certain flair for design in these ads, running them in big-block print with elegant line drawings at a time when the typical ad was busy with information.

According to tradition, it was also Eastman who hit upon the idea of the bright yellow packaging that even today stands out on shelves full of merchandise. After the blush of success, however, it became obvious that Eastman was stretching himself too thin, so he began casting around for someone to take over the job of advertising for the company. He found exactly the right man in Lewis Burnell Jones, a graduate of the University of Rochester then working for a Syracuse newspaper, whom he hired in March of Dapper and lanky, Jones became a mainstay at the Eastman company for the next four decades.

Jones showed his innate understanding of where the photography business was headed when he told an interviewer that "it was the charm of photography not just this little black box that must be sold to the public. One day, Eastman called him into his office and asked him why his copy was so good. When Jones ventured that it was because it had been written for the public and not for the boss, Eastman told him: "From now on I don't want to see any ads until they're printed.

Kodak as you go! It was Eastman, the perennial bachelor, who sprung this idea though he borrowed it, admittedly, from the Gibson Girls campaign on the public in , when he outfitted an outdoorsy young woman in a striped dress and had her picture taken with a camera in her hand. At first, the Kodak Girls were rendered in line drawings, but in , with improvements in half-tone, printing, photography, the first photographically illustrated Kodak Girl appeared in a newspaper ad.

An independent-minded traveler, the Kodak Girl was conveniently both a photographer and a photographic subject, and over the years many a boy and man became a secret admirer, while countless girls copied her look. As late as the s, the tradition lived on, as models trimmed out in striped suits descended on the beaches of England, snapping pictures of whomever happened to be there. By this time, of course, Eastman's advertising campaign had become so thoroughly engrained in people's minds that no one had to be informed of its meaning.

Taking pictures of beautiful girls with Kodak cameras in their hands, who were taking pictures themselves, was simply something that everyone did. By August, Eastman was having trouble filling orders as Kodak cameras made their way into the public arena.

President Grover Cleveland owned one, though he was apparently slow to learn to turn the key that advanced the film, as did the Dalai Lama, who took his with him when he left Tibet for the first time. Gilbert and Sullivan paid Eastman the ultimate compliment by immortalizing his product in song for the operetta "Utopia": Then all the crowd take down our looks In pocket memorandum books.

To diagnose Our modest pose The Kodaks do their best: If evidence you would possess Of what is maiden bashfulness You need a button press-- And we do the rest! The appearance of Eastman's cameras was so sudden and so pervasive that the reaction in some quarters was fear. A figure called the "camera fiend" began to appear at beach resorts, prowling the premises until he could catch female bathers unawares.

For a time, Kodak cameras were banned from the Washington Monument. The "Hartford Courant" sounded the alarm as well, declaring that "the sedate citizen can't indulge in any hilariousness without the risk of being caught in the act and having his photograph passed around among his Sunday School children. Where the daguerreotype and its wet-plate successors had required stillness from their subjects, the Kodak camera was able to capture their spontaneity.

So convincing were these new images of people that today it is difficult to believe that anyone had had any fun at all in the age of the daguerreotype. Did the snapshot simply record emotions that had eluded cameras before, or did it actually change the way people felt about themselves?

The question may be unanswerable in the end, but it is certainly true that the Kodak camera caught on America at exactly the moment when America was reaching new heights of liveliness. Everywhere, the tempo was picking up. The first automobiles were appearing on the streets.

Telephones were beginning to grace the homes of ordinary citizens. Motion pictures, made possible partly through Eastman's contribution of celluloid film, were actually recording all this activity and then speeding it up in presenting it to viewers.

Of course, during this same time, the very embodiment of fun had also sprung up at the edge of New York City. Coney Island, famous for so many things, was a veritable photogenic heaven. Where once visitors there had to be content with the Camera Obscura Observatory erected in , they suddenly held the power of the images in their hands: snapshots on the Ferris Wheel, snapshots on the roller coasters, they could take snapshots almost anywhere.

In yet another example of serendipity, the Brownie camera, which brought the price of a Kodak camera down to a truly democratic dollar, was introduced in , just as Coney Island was undergoing a postcard explosion. In , with the improvement of printing techniques and the increase in transportation speeds, the cost of postcards were lowered from two cents to one, and postcards began to scatter from Coney Island at an astonishing rate: on a single day in September , an astonishing , postcards were postmarked from Coney Island.

While the photographs on the Coney Island postcards were not, by and large, taken with Brownie cameras, they were nonetheless powerful emblems to their recipients, who saw for the first time how much fun photography could be. The twentieth century had arrived, and with it, the image of a smiling America.

Eastman Kodak Introduces Full Color Photography With the coming of the twentieth century and its intoxicating rhythms, many innovators intensified their search for the means to render photography in full color.

George Eastman was as interested as anyone in conquering the problem. Indeed, convinced correctly that color photography would be mostly the province of amateurs, he dedicated himself to finding a process that not only could offer the complete spectrum of colors but would be simple to use.

He eventually found one, although it would not turn out to be simple to develop. In , when Eastman established a color laboratory at Kodak Park under the leadership of MIT graduate Emerson Packard, lantern slides and hand-colored prints were enjoying tremendous popularity. Among the more successful marketers of lanterns slides were the Lumiere brothers, who a decade earlier had stunned the world with their projected motion pictures. The Lumieres offered to sell their lantern-slide operation to Eastman, but a visit to their Paris offices revealed a family operation in disarray, and Eastman, a prim bachelor with strict business standards, left in disgust.

Nevertheless, the European trip had strengthened Eastman's resolve. A series of efforts led by Packard and other Kodak employees resulted in the first signs of victory: a process that used red and green filters and transformed negatives directly into positives.

Dubbed Kodachrome, the color process would no doubt have gone to market, but progress was stalled by the outbreak of World War I. At this impasse, two complete amateurs entered the story and saved the day. After seeing an early color movie, Mannes and Godowsky became convinced that they could do better and built a three-lens camera that combined the three primary colors projected as light.

This had already been done by others, but in their excitement the failures of others did not seem worth exploring. The two went on to college and met again in New York after graduation, whereon they fell to photographic experimentation again. With the help of impresario S. Roxy Rothafel, they were able to use the projection booth at the Rialto to produce their first dark, fuzzy pictures. Soon they had surpassed the efforts of others and were photographing a part of the color spectrum on double-layered plates -- in the bathtubs and sinks of their homes.

Their parents did not approve of these scientific forays, however, and so in they turned to George Eastman for financial help. Eastman proved non-committal, but two years later, Mannes and Godowsky were able to ingratiate themselves with C.

Kenneth Mees, director of the Eastman Kodak Research Laboratory, and with that slender entree, to receive funding from other sources. In the Eastman Kodak Company made improvements in color-movie technology, but it still lagged behind the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation. He was poor, but even as a young man, he took it upon himself to support his widowed mother and two sisters, one of whom had polio.

He began his business career as a year old office boy in an insurance company and followed that with work as a clerk in a local bank.

He was George Eastman, and his ability to overcome financial adversity, his gift for organization and management, and his lively and inventive mind made him a successful entrepreneur by his mid-twenties, and enabled him to direct his Eastman Kodak Company to the forefront of American industry. But building a multinational corporation and emerging as one of the nation's most important industrialists required dedication and sacrifice. It did not come easily.

The house on the old Eastman homestead, where his father was born and where George spent his early years, has since been moved to the Genesee Country Museum in Mumford, N.

When George was five years old, his father moved the family to Rochester. There the elder Eastman devoted his energy to establishing Eastman Commercial College. Then tragedy struck. George's father died, the college failed and the family became financially distressed.

George continued school until he was Then, forced by family circumstances, he had to find employment. A year later, he became office boy for another insurance firm. Through his own initiative, he soon took charge of policy filing and even wrote policies. But, even with that increase, his income was not enough to meet family expenses.

He studied accounting at home evenings to get a better paying job. In , after five years in the insurance business, he was hired as a junior clerk at the Rochester Savings Bank.

When Eastman was 24, he made plans for a vacation to Santo Domingo. When a co-worker suggested he make a record of the trip, Eastman bought a photographic outfit with all the paraphernalia of the wet plate days.

The camera was as big as a microwave oven and needed a heavy tripod. And he carried a tent so that he could spread photographic emulsion on glass plates before exposing them, and develop the exposed plates before they dried out. There were chemicals, glass tanks, a heavy plate holder, and a jug of water. The complete outfit "was a pack-horse load," as he described it. Eastman did not make the Santo Domingo trip. But he did become completely absorbed in photography and sought to simplify the complicated process.

He read in British magazines that photographers were making their own gelatin emulsions. Plates coated with this emulsion remained sensitive after they were dry and could be exposed at leisure. Using a formula taken from one of these British journals, Eastman began making gelatin emulsions. He worked at the bank during the day and experimented at home in his mother's kitchen at night.

His mother said that some nights Eastman was so tired he couldn't undress, but slept on a blanket on the floor beside the kitchen stove. After three years of photographic experiments, Eastman had a formula that worked. By , he had not only invented a dry plate formula, but had patented a machine for preparing large numbers of the plates. He quickly recognized the possibilities of making dry plates for sale to other photographers.

In , London was the center of the photographic and business world. George Eastman went there to obtain a patent on his plate-coating machine. An American patent was granted the following year. In April , Eastman leased the third floor of a building on State Street in Rochester, and began to manufacture dry plates for sale. It was worth a chance, so I took it. Success of the dry plate venture so impressed businessman Henry A.

Strong, that he invested some money in the infant concern. Late that year, Eastman resigned from his position at the Rochester Savings Bank to devote all his time to the new company and its business. While actively managing all phases of the firm's activities, he continued research in an effort to simplify photography.

A successive concern -- the Eastman Company, was formed in He saw all four as being closely related. Mass production could not be justified without wide distribution. Distribution, in turn, needed the support of strong advertising. Why wait? Ackerman, Carl W. George Eastman.

Brayer, Elizabeth. George Eastman: A Biography. Holmes, Burnham. Toggle navigation. Hobby becomes a business In the s American photography was still time-consuming, difficult, and expensive. Growth and new developments Eastman expected that photography would soon become more popular, and in he established the Eastman Kodak George Eastman.

Later years Eastman cared about his employees; he was the first American businessman to grant workers shares in the profits made by the company.

User Contributions: 1. I'm George's cousin 4th removed and many stories and artifacts along with Family photos cameras By the way my father 3rd removed told me that George gave away million dollars. I also have the 1K page book that George had made around , ther were only two or three ever made. Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: Name:.

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