a cartoon showing Eastman when he discovered photography – Courtesy of the Eastman Museum (I have a book with this image somewhere)
Toronto. When Englishman Richard Maddox discovered a dry plate process fast enough for use in a camera, he set in motion many things including the shift in technological revolution from the old world to the new. During the 1870s in the USA, three companies developed and made dry plates for sale in stores.
Two of the three were professional photographers who immigrated from Europe. The third was a young American-born person with no professional experience. He was George Eastman, a junior clerk in a Rochester bank. Eastman left the bank and after many experiments founded The Eastman Dry Plate Company aided by a well established businessman with deep pockets.
Eastman’s savvy led to film, the famous Kodak and Brownie lines of cameras, plus many merges and acquisitions, and the discovery of a high quality colour transparency process (Kodachrome), filters, darkroom chemicals and eventually to his company, now called Eastman Kodak, becoming the world’s largest photographic enterprise offering still cameras, movie cameras, film, darkroom products, and more for amateurs and professionals alike.
George never married and in 1932 he perished by his own hand after famously writing, “My work is done. Why wait?”. A few years later, Kodachrome came on the market and ‘black and white’ film continued to be improved in speed and resolution – just a few of the massive creations by Kodak post 1932, Hint: The first digital cameras began life in a Kodak Laboratory but the discovery was never acted on until it was far too late for Kodak.
