George Eastman (July 12, 1854 – March 14, 1932) was an American innovator and entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and helped to bring the photographic use of roll film into the mainstream. After a decade of experiments in photography, he patented and sold a roll film camera, making amateur photography accessible to the general public for the first time. Working as the treasurer and later president of Kodak, he oversaw the expansion of the company and the film industry.
Eastman was a major philanthropist, establishing the Eastman School of Music, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, and schools of dentistry and medicine at the University of Rochester and Eastman Dental Hospital at University College London, and making large contributions to the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), the construction of several buildings at the second campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on the Charles River, and Tuskegee University and Hampton University, two historically black universities in the South. With interests in improving health, he provided funds for clinics in London and other European cities to serve low-income residents.
In his final two years, Eastman was in intense pain caused by a disorder affecting his spine. On March 14, 1932, he shot himself in the heart, leaving a note which read, "To my friends: my work is done. Why wait?"
Eastman is regarded as one of the most influential and well-known residents of Rochester, New York. He has been commemorated on several college campuses and the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and the George Eastman Museum has been designated a National Historic Landmark.
Eastman was born in Waterville, New York, as the youngest child of George Washington Eastman and Maria Eastman (née Kilbourn), at the 10-acre (4.0 ha) farm which his parents had bought in 1849. He had two older sisters, Ellen Maria and Katie. He was largely self-educated, although he attended a private school in Rochester after the age of eight.
In the early 1840s, his father had started a business school, the Eastman Commercial College in Rochester, New York. The city became one of the first "boomtowns" in the United States, based on its rapid industrialization. As his father's health started deteriorating, the family gave up the farm and moved to Rochester in 1860. His father died of a brain disorder on April 27, 1862. To survive and afford George's schooling, his mother took in boarders.
The second daughter, Katie, had contracted polio when young and died in late 1870 when George was 15 years old. The young George left school early and started working to help support the family. As Eastman began to have success with his photography business, he vowed to repay his mother for the hardships she had endured in raising him.
While working as a bank clerk in the 1870s, Eastman became interested in photography. After receiving lessons from George Monroe and George Selden, he developed a machine for coating dry plates in 1879. In 1881, he founded the Eastman Dry Plate Company with Henry Strong to sell plates, with Strong as company president and Eastman as treasurer, where he handled most executive functions. Around the same time, he began experiments to create a flexible film roll that could replace plates altogether. In 1885, he received a patent for a film roll and then focused on creating a camera to use the rolls. In 1888, he patented and released the Kodak camera ("Kodak" being a word Eastman created). It was sold loaded with enough roll film for 100 exposures. When all the exposures had been made, the photographer mailed the camera back to the Eastman company in Rochester, along with $10. The company would process the film, make a print of each exposure, load another roll of film into the camera, and send the camera and the prints to the photographer.
The separation of photo-taking from the difficult process of film development was novel and made photography more accessible to amateurs than ever before, and the camera was immediately popular with the public. By August 1888, Eastman was struggling to meet orders, and he and his employees soon had several other cameras in development. The rapidly-growing Eastman Dry Plate Company was reorganized as the Eastman Company in 1889, and then incorporated as Eastman Kodak in 1892.
Eastman recognized that most of his revenue would come from the sale of additional film rolls, rather than camera sales, and focused on film production. By providing quality and affordable film to every camera manufacturer, Kodak managed to turn competitors into de facto business partners. In 1889 he patented the processes for the first nitrocellulose film along with chemist Henry Reichenbach. Several patent infringement lawsuits would preoccupy Eastman and his lawyers in subsequent years, including one from Reichenbach after he was fired in 1892. The largest lawsuit would come from rival film producer Ansco. Inventor Hannibal Goodwin had filed a patent for nitrocellulose film in 1887, before Eastman and Reichenbach's, but it was not granted until 1898. Ansco purchased the patent in 1900 and sued Kodak for infringement. Kodak ultimately lost the suit, which lasted over a decade and cost the company $5 Million.
Eastman paid close attention to Kodak's advertisements. He coined the slogan, "You press the button, we do the rest", which became ubiquitous in the general public.
As Kodak pursued a monopoly on film through patents and acquisitions, the company experienced rapid growth. By 1896, Kodak was the leading supplier of film stock internationally, and by 1915, the company was the largest employer in Rochester, with over 8,000 employees and annual earnings of $15.7 million. In 1934, shortly after Eastman's death, Kodak employed 23,000. One of the largest markets for film became the emerging motion picture industry. When Thomas Edison and other film producers formed the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908, Eastman negotiated for Kodak to be the sole supplier of film to the industry. His monopolistic actions attracted the attention of the federal government, which began an anti-trust investigation into Kodak in 1911 for exclusive contracts, acquisitions of competitors, and price-fixing. This resulted in a lawsuit against Kodak in 1913 and a final judgment in 1921, ordering Kodak to stop fixing prices and sell many of its interests.
Kodak's growth was sustained during the 20th century by innovations in film and cameras, including the Brownie camera, which was marketed to children. Eastman took interest in color photography in 1904, and funded experiments in color film production for the next decade. The resulting product, created by John Capstaff, was a two-color process named Kodachrome. Later, in 1935, Kodak would release the more famous second Kodachrome, the first marketed integral tripack film. During World War I, Eastman established a photographic school in Rochester to train pilots for aerial reconnaissance.
In an era of growing trade union activities, Eastman sought to counter the union movement by anticipating worker demands. To this end, he implemented several worker benefit programs, including a welfare fund to provide workmen's compensation in 1910 and a profit-sharing program for all employees in 1912.
Eastman never married. He was close to his mother and to his sister Ellen Maria and her family. He had a long platonic relationship with Josephine Dickman, a trained singer and the wife of business associate George Dickman. He became especially close to Dickman after the death of his mother, Maria Eastman, in 1907. He was also an avid traveler, enjoyed music and social gatherings, and had a passion for playing the piano.
The loss of his mother, Maria, was particularly crushing to George. Almost pathologically concerned with decorum, he found himself, for the first time, unable to control his emotions in the presence of his friends. "When my mother died, I cried all day", he said later. "I could not have stopped to save my life." Due to his mother's reluctance to accept his gifts, Eastman could never do enough for his mother during her lifetime. He continued to honor her after her death. On September 4, 1922, he opened the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, which included a chamber-music hall, Kilbourn Theater, dedicated to his mother's memory. At the Eastman House, he maintained a rose bush, using a cutting from her childhood home.