Jan 1956 Kodak Home Movies ad
Toronto. A game we played as kids was “King of the Castle”. The young kids struggled to get on the top of the pile – the others were all “dirty rascals”. The idea of the game applied to many industries, including photography. For most of the last century, Kodak reigned supreme in North American photography. Movies, films, cameras, books, darkroom, studio, etc. – Kodak had it all.
In Quebec, Kodak and camera were synonymous. Any camera was a “Kodak” regardless of make. Ironically, in the 1970s, a Kodak wizard developed the first feasible digital camera. Unfortunately Kodak made its money at the time selling film so the concept of a digital anything lacked traction.
Sticking with film technology, Kodak was seriously affected as the last century wore on. By late in the last century Kodak Park in Rochester was flattened as was much of the Kodak campus here in the Mount Dennis area of Toronto as Kodak struggled to survive. And by the early 2000s, Kodak had long since seen the error of its ways and was busy transforming itself to a digital powerhouse as described by Peter Little in his March 2004 PHSC talk, “The Move to Digital“.
A few years later, in September 2007 Gordon Brown spoke to the PHSC in a talk he titled, “BC and AD – Photography before computers and after digital“, In his talk, Gordon noted that the Kodak wizard I mentioned above was engineer Steve Sasson. Sasson made the first working digital camera in 1975 using the Fairchild 100 x 100 pixel CCD sensor – making an incredibly tiny image by today’s standards.
Shown above is a typical advertisement by Kodak in the days when the company and film were “top of the heap”. My thanks to good friend and fellow PHSC member, George Dunbar” for finding and sharing the above January, 1956 Popular Mechanics ad.
