Photograph courtesy of Cameras From Daguerreotypes to
Instant Pictures by Brian Coe
The Kodak organization was founded by the young American, George Eastman,
who worked as a bookkeeper in the Rochester Savings Bank in New York State.
He became interested in photography in 1877, taking lessons from a local
Rochester photographer.
He was soon dissatisfied with the need to carry around, as he put it,
"a pack-horse load" of equipment required to coat and process plates on
the spot.
In 1878 he read of improvements to the dry plate process and he began
to experiment with the coating of gelatin dry plates and by the end of
that year he had been sufficiently successful as to consider the manufacture
of plates for sale.
In June 1879 he had invented a machine
for
coating plates, which he patented, and income from the sale of licenses
for this machine enabled him to prepare for the manufacture of his own
brand of plates.
He obtained financial backing from a buggy whip manufacturer, Colonel
Henry A Strong, and on the 1st of January 1881 the Eastman Dry Plate Company
was formed.
The business went well and Eastman, always thinking of ways to make
photography easier, turned to the idea of using paper as a base for the
negatives instead of the heavy and fragile glass plates and in 1884 theEastman
Dry Plate and Film Company, working from a four story building in State
Street, was named.
Later in 1885 he was able to market a new product, American Film, a
paper base coated with a layer of soluble gelatin, then a layer of collodion
and finally a gelatin emulsion.
The exposed and developed negative image could be separated from the
paper base during processing and laid down onto glass or thick gelatin
sheets. The product combined the light weight and flexibility of paper
with the transparency of glass for printing.
In the belief that many more people would take up photography if it
could be simplified, Eastman decided to start to manufacture cameras.