Part IThe Story
Nine Words and a Pair of Initials
The note ran to nine words and a pair of initials. To my friends: my work is done. Why wait? GE. Depending on who transcribed it, the colon becomes a comma and the question mark is followed by a dash, but no version contains a wasted syllable. He left it at his house at 900 East Avenue in Rochester on March 14, 1932, and then, at seventy-seven, George Eastman shot himself once through the heart.
For two years a disorder of the spine had been taking him apart: today it might be called disc herniation, or lumbar spinal stenosis, the canal narrowing as the vertebrae calcified. He had trouble standing. His walk had become a slow shuffle. The house around him had been built between 1902 and 1905 to anticipate nearly every need a body might have. It had fifty rooms over 35,000 square feet and a fireproof skeleton of reinforced concrete, its own electrical generator, an internal telephone system with twenty-one stations, a built-in vacuum cleaning system, a central clock network, an elevator, and a great Aeolian pipe organ that, in better years, played him awake each morning at seven-thirty. Behind the Georgian Revival facade there were 10.5 acres of working farmland, greenhouses, stables, pastures, cows and chickens kept in the middle of a city because he liked their products at the table. The house could manage time, temperature, light, sound, food, and fire. It could not manage the spine.
His mother, Maria Kilbourn Eastman, had spent the last two years of her life in a wheelchair. He had watched that. Whether the memory entered the arithmetic of March 1932, nobody can say, and he did not say. He had spent a lifetime not saying.
Seven years earlier, stepping down as president of the Eastman Kodak Company, he had told the press that his remaining years were "very precious" to him and that he was "now doing what the movies call a 'fade-out.'" It was a joke from a man who had supplied the film for most of the movies, and it was not quite true. A New Yorker writer who visited in 1928 found that the fading "has not become apparent at the company offices yet. He still runs the business." What the line did reveal was a habit of mind. Eastman thought of his own life as footage. Footage can be edited. It has an ending someone chooses.
The paradox is so neat it reads like a parable invented after the fact, but it was reported in his lifetime. The man who made the camera a universal instrument, and whose factories poured out, as that 1928 profile put it, "countless millions of feet of motion-picture film and the material for billions of photographs," was himself "a very amateur photographer, with an incurable tendency to over-expose his negatives." He was camera-shy. He insisted on controlling every snapshot for which he consented to pose. His film was behind the glow of Broadway, and yet, the profile noted with some relish, "not a headwaiter in New York would trouble to find him a good table in a crowded cafe." He was not a recluse. His number was in the Rochester telephone book like anyone else's. He simply declined to become an image.
The slogan he wrote for his first camera in 1888 was You press the button, we do the rest. It is an advertising line, and it is also a division of labor, a theory of the customer, and, read with a little hindsight, a self-portrait. Most people would be invited to press the button. Eastman would do the rest: the chemistry, the coating, the patents, the factories, the pricing, the silence. Almost everything in his life, from the welfare fund to the thirteen-month calendar to the nine-word note, falls on one side or the other of that sentence.
By the Numbers
The Eastman Ledger
$800Annual salary as a Rochester bank clerk, at twenty
$25Price of the 1888 Kodak, preloaded with 100 exposures
$10Fee to mail it back to Rochester for prints and a new roll
8,000+Kodak employees in Rochester by 1915, the city's largest employer
No. 2Kodak's rank among U.S. silver buyers in 1922, behind only the Treasury
$100MGiven away during his lifetime, often as 'Mr. Smith'
1928–1989Years Kodak kept its books on Eastman's 13-month calendar
A Fortune Founded in the Kitchen Sink
Everything started wrong. That was the New Yorker's verdict in 1928, and it holds up.
His father, George Washington Eastman, founded a business school in Rochester, the Eastman Commercial College, in the early 1840s, which makes him one of the first Americans to sell the idea that commerce could be taught. He kept a ten-acre farm in Waterville, New York, bought in 1849, where his third child and only son was born on July 12, 1854. As the father's health failed, the family gave up the farm and moved to Rochester in 1860, a canal-and-flour boomtown already industrializing faster than almost anywhere in the country. On April 27, 1862, the elder Eastman died of a brain disorder. The man who taught business left his family almost nothing.
Maria Eastman took in boarders. Her younger daughter, Katie, had contracted polio as a child, and she died in late 1870, when George was fifteen. The boy had already left school at fourteen to run errands in an insurance office, studying accounting at night. He was, the 1928 profile says, setting out "to learn the habits of money." At twenty he became a bank clerk at eight hundred dollars a year. He saved. He saved, eventually, three thousand dollars.
It is worth pausing on the size of that number relative to the salary, because it explains more about the next fifty-eight years than any patent. Three thousand dollars on eight hundred a year is not thrift. It is a system.
Then came the only impulsive decision anyone recorded him making. President Grant was promoting Santo Domingo as a site for a naval base, the island was briefly fashionable, and the hard-driven young clerk decided to splurge on a vacation there. A colleague at the bank suggested he take a camera. Eastman bought one: the outfit of the wet-plate era, glass plates that had to be coated, sensitized, exposed, and developed while still wet, a portable darkroom's worth of chemicals and apparatus. The 1928 account says he paid "the only other amateur in Rochester" five dollars to teach him; the later record names two instructors, George Monroe and George Selden. Either way, the lessons took. He never went to the West Indies.
He read, by chance, that dry plates were being made in England, plates that could be coated in advance and exposed later. He decided to make his own. By day he counted other people's money at the bank, and by night he worked in a darkroom at home, sleeping in broken doses or not at all. On Saturday nights he began paying off the week's debt, and Sunday became "a long drowsy blank with three slight breaks when his mother awakened him for meals." On Monday morning he was back at the bank. "It was then," the profile says, "that he laid the foundation of his fortune — in the kitchen sink."
In September 1879 he filed a patent for a "Method and Apparatus for Coating Plates," a machine to do mechanically what had been done by hand. It issued in April 1880. He quit the bank, put his capital into a two-man plant, and that autumn landed a large order from a jobber. All winter he delivered plates that went into storage against the coming season. In the spring, the plates were found to have spoiled.
There had been no guaranty. He was not legally obliged to do anything. "Ship them back to Rochester," he ordered, and he replaced them. Then he sailed to England, studied the plants there, bought a formula, came home, and watched it fail in his own factory. He started over and won.
The reason he had to start over was the reason everyone in the business had to start over, constantly. Photochemistry was empirical. You did thus and so, and the results were thus and so, sometimes. Nobody knew why. Years later, Eastman's research laboratories would trace the mystery to the gelatin in the coating, which the 1928 writer memorably called "a frivolous, whimsical colloid." A man who could not abide variance had built his first business on a substance with moods. Everything that followed can be read as an effort to remove the moods: from gelatin, from labor markets, from the calendar, from time itself.
The President Who Sold Buggy Whips
For thirty-five years, the president of the company was not George Eastman.
Henry Alvah Strong was born in Rochester on August 30, 1838, sixteen years before his partner. He came from a family in the business of words and faith. His father, Alvah Strong, printed the city's early newspapers, the Anti-Masonic Enquirer, the Morning Advertiser, and the Weekly Republican, before running The Daily Democrat for years; he was also a deacon of the First Baptist Church and a founder of the Rochester Theological Seminary. Henry's older brother Augustus went to Yale, became a Baptist minister, presided over that seminary from 1872 to 1912, and wrote a Systematic Theology that became a mainstay of Protestant seminary instruction in North America. Augustus argued, among other things, that the persons of the Trinity share "a numerical unity of nature," three modes of subsistence in one indivisible essence. It is a subtle position about how one thing can be several. Henry married Helen Griffin on his twenty-first birthday and went into the family trade, which was buggy whips.
He met Eastman in 1870, when the younger man was sixteen. Ten years later they formed a partnership, and on January 1, 1881, the Eastman Dry Plate Company opened with Strong as president and Eastman as treasurer. The treasurer handled most of the executive functions. The president lent the firm his money, his name, and the solidity of a man who had already made a business work.
Business writers would eventually make the buggy whip their favorite emblem of obsolescence, the product made perfect just in time to be unnecessary. In 1881 it was simply a good business, and its proceeds were wagered on a technology that turned out to be the future. The arrangement suited both men. Strong got a stake in an invention. Eastman got cover. The title went to the older man, while the decisions, the formulas, and the lawsuits stayed with the treasurer. Long after the company was famous around the world, its operating genius signed the checks.
Strong stayed president through every reincorporation: the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company on October 1, 1884; the Eastman Company in November 1889; Eastman Kodak on May 23, 1892. He held the title until he died at home in Rochester on July 26, 1919, at eighty. Eighteen days later, his son Henry Griffin Strong, who had gone into stamped metal and then into selling Lozier, Pope-Hartford, and White automobiles, died in Los Angeles of complications from influenza. He was forty-six. The father had backed the new way of seeing, and the son had sold the new way of moving.
Strong's name is now on Strong Memorial Hospital and on Strong Auditorium at the University of Rochester, a bas-relief of his face in the hall. Eastman became president after his death. He held the title for about six years, and then he retired from it.
He wanted a word that meant nothing.
The letter K was a favorite. "It seems a strong, incisive sort of letter," he said. He worked out the name with his mother, Maria, using an Anagrams set, the parlor word game, on three principles: it should be short, easy to pronounce, and neither resemble any other name nor be associated with anything else. A company advertisement in 1920 was blunt about the result. The name "was simply invented — made up from letters of the alphabet to meet our trademark requirements. It was short and euphonious and likely to stick in the public mind." He trademarked Kodak in 1888. Within a generation it was in the dictionaries as both noun and verb.
That is the official account, and it is entirely a matter of engineering. The 1928 profile offers another one, delivered in a different register: that the Ks stood for his mother, "whose name Kilbourn is a word of worship to Eastman." Both may be true. A word designed to mean nothing was assembled at a kitchen table with the one person who meant everything, and the letter he chose happened to be hers.
The camera itself, patented in 1888, was a box. It had a fixed-focus lens and no viewfinder; two V-shaped silhouettes on top gave the user a rough line of aim. There was a key to advance the film, a pull-string to set the shutter, and a button on the side. It cost twenty-five dollars and came loaded with a roll of a hundred exposures. When the roll was finished, the owner mailed the entire camera back to Rochester with ten dollars. The company developed the negatives, made a print of each, loaded a fresh roll, and sent the camera and the pictures home.
The whole design rests on what the camera leaves out. There is no darkroom, no chemistry, no glass, no judgment about exposure, not even the act of looking through a lens with precision. Photography had been a craft; Eastman cut it in half and sold the half that required no craft. "He observed that the consumer is lazy and impatient," the 1928 writer explained; "he saw the rise of the great American demand for results, automatically delivered and ready-made." By August 1888 Eastman was struggling to fill orders. The slogan escaped into the language almost at once. Chauncey Depew quoted it in a speech, and Gilbert and Sullivan worked it into Utopia, Limited.
None of this happened cleanly. The roll system was assembled from a decade of partial solutions, some of them borrowed. In 1885 Eastman and William H. Walker patented a practical roll holder that let a plate camera store multiple exposures; that same year he patented a paper-backed film he called "American film." Before his own camera was finished he had to pay an inventor named David Houston for a license to an earlier roll-holder patent, and he later bought it outright. Paper was a poor substrate. The negatives had to be stripped from it in Rochester, which was one reason the first Kodaks went back to the factory, and Eastman wanted volume, not mail-order intimacy. He hired a chemist, Henry Reichenbach, to find something better. In 1889 they patented a process for flexible, transparent nitrocellulose film. Reichenbach was fired in 1892 and sued.
On September 2, 1889, a money order for two dollars and fifty cents arrived from Thomas Edison, who was struggling toward a motion-picture machine and had sent for a sample of the new material: fifty feet long, one inch wide. "Out of that strip," the 1928 account says, the motion-picture industry was born. Eastman did not meet Edison in person until the early 1920s, at a movie-industry luncheon at the Ritz. He supplied the material for the American cinema for three decades without needing to shake the hand of the man who invented it.
In 1898, on a trip to London about the British Kodak business, he discovered that he had a million dollars in profits he could actually take out.
"I hurried home to Rochester to see my mother," he said later. "'I've got a whole million,' I told her. She said, 'That's nice,' and never mentioned it again. It did not impress her much."
He told that story more than once, and he seems to have liked it. The anecdote has the shape of a joke on himself, a man sprinting across the Atlantic with a number and a woman declining to be impressed by it. It also has the shape of the thing he could never purchase.
We Do the Rest
The second half of the slogan was the business.
Eastman understood early that the camera was a delivery mechanism and the film was the product. Every roll exposed was a roll repurchased. He focused the company on control of film, and he made Kodak the supplier of quality, affordable film to every camera maker, which, as one history puts it, "turned competitors into de facto business partners." A rival who built a better box still had to buy his film. In later decades this would be called the razor-and-blades model, and it would change little at Kodak for most of the twentieth century.
The rest of the playbook was more pointed. In the 1890s and 1900s Kodak grew by innovation, acquisition, and exclusive contract. Construction of Kodak Park began in 1890. By 1896 Kodak was the leading film supplier in the world. The British holdings went under a holding company, Kodak Limited, in 1898, and an Australian subsidiary followed in 1908. Advertising found the customer who was not yet a photographer. The "Kodak Girl" campaigns aimed squarely at young, white, middle-class women, and in 1900 the Brownie camera aimed at children. Both moves pushed the button further down the age and gender ladder, toward people who had never been invited into a darkroom.
When Edison and the other producers formed the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908, the first screen trust, Eastman negotiated to make Kodak the sole supplier of film to the industry. The independents who sat outside the trust were left with inferior foreign stock and, the 1928 profile says, "bought and bootlegged Eastman film by strange devices." In 1912, with the trust under heavy legal fire, a New York photo-supplies dealer named Jules Brulatour negotiated on the independents' behalf. Eastman was released from the exclusive contract under a royalty arrangement, and Brulatour became Eastman's agent to the trade and collected commissions for years. Eastman had sold to the cartel, and then he sold to the cartel's enemies through a middleman, and he profited on both sides of the war.
The federal government noticed. In 1911 it opened an antitrust investigation into Kodak's exclusive contracts, acquisitions of competitors, and price-fixing. A lawsuit followed in 1913 and a consent decree in 1921 ordering Kodak to stop fixing prices and to sell many of its interests. Eastman's own position was characteristically split. He had cautioned his board against eliminating competition outright, but he believed most of the company's other monopolistic practices served consumers by letting Kodak make high-quality goods. He wanted a market, and he wanted to set its terms.
The patent fight was older and lasted longer. A clergyman in Newark, the Reverend Hannibal Goodwin, had filed his own patent for nitrocellulose film in 1887, two years before Eastman and Reichenbach. The patent office denied it, then reversed itself in 1898. The rival film producer Ansco bought the patent in 1900 and sued Kodak in 1902. The case ran for more than a decade before it settled in 1914. Most accounts put the cost at five million dollars; the 1928 profile, discreet on its subject's behalf, reported that the figure was "said to be three million" and added that this "does not preclude the probability that the origin of Eastman film was entirely independent." Nobody involved wanted the number written down precisely, which is its own kind of precision.
By 1915 Kodak was the largest employer in Rochester, with more than 8,000 workers and annual earnings of $15.7 million. In 1914 the company built its headquarters on State Street. By 1922 it was buying more silver than any entity in the country except the United States Treasury. A great deal of the silver ended up in negatives in shoeboxes, the visible record of millions of strangers' Christmases and christenings. The man responsible for that record overexposed his own.
The Only Man Who Knew
In 1912 Kodak bought a British company called Wratten and Wainwright, and what it was buying was a person.
Charles Edward Kenneth Mees was born on May 26, 1882, in Wellingborough, England, the son of a Wesleyan minister. Like Henry Strong, he came from a household of doctrine and drifted into the chemistry of images. He earned a D.Sc. from the University of London in 1906 with a dissertation on photographic theory, and from 1906 to 1912 he worked with Frederick Wratten on the first panchromatic plates, emulsions that responded to the whole visible spectrum, along with filters and darkroom safelights. Kodak acquired the firm because of his skills. Eastman persuaded him to move to Rochester, where in 1912 Mees founded the Kodak Research Laboratories in Building 3 at Kodak Park and became their first director.
The purchase answered the oldest problem in Eastman's life, the frivolous colloid. A man who had once watched a season's inventory spoil without knowing why now paid a scientist to find out why. The lab's early work went into emulsions for color photography and radiography. Eastman had become interested in color in 1904 and financed experiments for a decade. In 1915 the company sold Kodachrome, a two-color process developed in the lab by John Capstaff. A different film by the same name, the three-color stock that made the name famous, came twenty years later. Another two-color film, coated on both sides, was sold for X-rays because its short exposures meant less radiation for the patient.
Mees became the keeper of the company's secrets in the literal sense. "Among Eastman's twenty thousand workers today," the 1928 profile reported, "there is only one man, Dr. Charles E. K. Mees, head of the research laboratory, who knows all Eastman's chemical secrets." Secrecy, it added, "was then, and still is, a large factor in the photographic manufacturing industry." Eastman did not keep the formulas in his own head. He kept them in one other head, an imported one, the son of a Methodist preacher from the English Midlands.
The lab's later history runs far past Eastman, and it bends in strange directions. After Pearl Harbor, Mees became an American citizen so he could work on classified war projects. In 1943 he met General Leslie Groves, and a team of Kodak scientists joined the Manhattan Project to enrich uranium-235 at Oak Ridge. In 1945 a batch of Kodak X-ray film turned up mysteriously fogged. A Kodak physicist named Julian Webb, who had worked at Oak Ridge, traced the cause to strawboard packaging from Vincennes, Indiana, irradiated by fallout that had drifted from the Trinity test site. Eastman's film was sensitive enough to detect the most closely held secret in the world. By 1951 the Atomic Energy Commission was giving Kodak schedules of nuclear tests in exchange for its silence.
Mees lost a leg to thrombosis in 1951, learned an artificial limb, and drove his own car. He wrote a book called The Organization of Industrial Scientific Research, retired in 1955, and died suddenly in Honolulu in 1960. There is a crater on the Moon with his name on it. Under the lab Eastman built and Mees ran, Kodak's scientists would one day invent most of the components of the device that ended Kodak's business, but that comes later.
The last great product of Eastman's own era came out of the lab while he was away. Kodacolor, a color process for amateurs and "the attainment of many years of effort," was perfected while he was on his final African safari. Its announcement was held until he got back. They waited for the man who did the rest before telling the people who pressed the button.
A Separate Class
In an era of strikes, Eastman decided he would rather pay first.
In 1910 he set up a welfare fund to provide workmen's compensation. In 1912 he started profit-sharing for every employee. In 1919, the year Henry Strong died, he sold a large block of his own stock to employees below market value. In 1920 he founded the Eastman Savings and Loan to serve Kodak workers; it survives as ESL Federal Credit Union. By 1928 his stock dividends to employees had totaled some ten million dollars, and many of them, the New Yorker noted, "have grown wealthy by investing in the concern." Kodak became a pioneer of what historians call welfare capitalism, and other Rochester employers raised wages and benefits to compete with it.
He was not sentimental about any of this. He feared unions and believed that paying better than union scale would prevent organizing and spare the company the cost of a strike. Selling his stock to employees served two more purposes. Investors who had been wary of a company with one dominant holder grew more comfortable, and the lower share price helped keep antitrust lawyers at a distance. The economics favored generosity, too. Kodak was capital-intensive, with a low ratio of labor to total costs, so benefits cost it less than they would have cost a textile mill. The generosity was real, and it was also a hedge and a bargain.
The benefits kept growing after he stepped back, often through a young company statistician named Marion Folsom, born in 1893, a numbers man who saw welfare as an actuarial problem with a moral answer. In 1928 Folsom pushed Kodak into life insurance, disability benefits, and retirement annuities. In 1931 he created the Rochester Plan, a privately funded unemployment insurance program that paid out from 1933 to 1936; few other companies joined, and its effect on the city was slight. Folsom later served as a Kodak director and then in Dwight Eisenhower's cabinet. Eastman's private experiment had trained a man who would carry its logic into Washington.
What Eastman was building was not a workforce so much as a tribe. Children of employees were hired to follow their parents. Turnover at Kodak in the 1950s was 13 percent, against 50 percent for American manufacturers as a whole. The annual wage dividend usually came to 15 percent of base pay. No attempt to unionize Kodak workers succeeded during the entire twentieth century. A Rochester journalist named Curt Gerling described what the arrangement did to the city's social map:
— Curt Gerling, Rochester journalistFrom the cradle infants are impressed with the fact that 'daddy is a Kodak man'; inferentially this compares with 'our father is a 33rd degree mason.'
A tribe has borders. Under Eastman, Kodak hired almost exclusively from Anglo-Saxon backgrounds and excluded Catholic immigrants, Jews, and African Americans. About a third of the workforce was female, so the line was not drawn by sex. It was drawn by origin. In 1939 a New York State legislative commission on the conditions of Black urban residents found that Kodak employed exactly one Black worker. The Eastman Dental Dispensary, founded in 1915 to care for the city's children, turned away Black applicants. The Eastman Theatre seated Black patrons only in the balcony. In 1929 Eastman refused a direct request for a meeting from Walter White, president of the NAACP, as he had refused others.
He was also, at the same time, the largest donor of his era to the Hampton Institute and the Tuskegee Institute, two historically Black colleges in the South. Marion Gleason, a close confidante, later described his views on Black Americans as "typical of his time — paternalistic, but strictly against social fraternization." The money went south, and the jobs stayed in Rochester. From 1925 until his death he gave $10,000 a year to the American Eugenics Society. In 1932 he raised the gift to $15,000. That increase came in the last weeks of his life.
The account was settled long after he died, and not by him. Rochester's Black population grew from 7,845 in 1950 to roughly 40,000 by 1964. In 1965 the organizer Saul Alinsky helped form a group called F.I.G.H.T. (Freedom, Integration, God, Honor — Today), led by the Reverend Franklin Florence. It protested Kodak's hiring until, in 1967, the company agreed to hire 600 Black workers through a training program. The tribe opened its gate thirty-five years after its founder's death, under pressure from a minister, which in Rochester was an old story with a new congregation.
Mr. Smith Gives Eleven Million Dollars
He gave money the way he made film: in volume, under controlled conditions, without his face on it.
During his lifetime Eastman gave away about $100 million, more than $2 billion in today's terms, and became one of the country's largest philanthropists. His largest gifts went to the University of Rochester and to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he paid for buildings on the new Charles River campus. He did it under the name "Mr. Smith." The 1928 profile reported that the "Mysterious Mr. Smith" gave MIT eleven million dollars and kept the secret for years. MIT eventually put a plaque with his likeness on one of the buildings, and students rub its nose for luck. The man who would not let a photographer near him without approving the result is now touched for good fortune by strangers who never ask permission.
The giving had a logic, and the 1928 writer laid it out with some admiration. Part of the money went to training "which will enable workers to make money for themselves." Part went to music, because of "the emotional need of the workers of this machine age." In 1918 he endowed the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, and in 1921 a school of medicine and dentistry. In 1922 he founded the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and hired the British conductor Albert Coates. In 1915 he had started the Eastman Dental Dispensary. In 1926 Lord Riddell, chairman of London's Royal Free Hospital, approached him, and Eastman gave £200,000 for a children's dental clinic; it opened on November 20, 1931, with Neville Chamberlain, then Minister of Health, in attendance. In 1929 he created a visiting professorship at Oxford for a distinguished American scholar each year. A children's dental clinic in Stockholm bearing his name opened in 1937, five years after he was dead. Teeth, music, and engineering were what he paid for: a machine age's body, soul, and tools, in that order.
On September 4, 1922, he opened the Eastman Theatre in Rochester. Inside it was a chamber-music hall, and he named it Kilbourn, for his mother.
Maria Eastman had died in 1907. She had never let him do enough for her. She was reluctant to accept his gifts, and the million had earned only "That's nice." Her death broke something in a man who was, by every account, almost pathologically concerned with decorum.
— George Eastman, on the death of his mother in 1907When my mother died, I cried all day. I could not have stopped to save my life.
It is the only recorded moment in which the treasurer lost control of the ledger. After it he did what he did with everything else: he built systems around the loss. He put her family name on a hall. In the garden at East Avenue he kept a rose bush grown from a cutting taken at her childhood home. He told visitors, "I regret that I did not take her name myself. George Kilbourn Eastman would have been better." He never married. The 1928 profile states flatly that "no woman's name has ever been mentioned with his." The record does contain one, Josephine Dickman, a trained singer married to his business associate George Dickman, with whom he had a long platonic relationship that deepened after his mother's death. He offered visitors the brusque opinion that sentiment had been left out of his makeup. The rose bush in his garden said otherwise.
He was an odd mix of extravagance and economy. He cooked for himself and was proud of a thickly frosted chocolate cake. He laid his own fires because he had a finicky idea of how they should be built. He was, the profile said, "positively aggressive in scarves." He smoked many cigarettes through a black onyx holder with a gold ejector. He carried a jackknife and whittled in his attic workshop. Up in the attic there was also a darkroom where, presumably, he went on overexposing negatives in private, and a screening room where he showed friends footage from African hunts with Daniel Pomeroy and Martin Johnson. The house had a trophy room. One of its objects, a mounted elephant head, is still there.
Thirteen Months of Twenty-Eight Days
On January 17, 1925, Eastman invited a British accountant named Moses B. Cotsworth to his house.
Cotsworth had designed what he called the International Fixed Calendar: thirteen months of exactly twenty-eight days each, every month starting on a Sunday, every date landing on the same weekday every year, with a spare day left over. A mutual friend had shown the system to Eastman, and he was taken with it. For a year he funded Cotsworth in secret. Then he endorsed the plan openly, financed the campaign for a new world calendar, and became chairman of the National Committee on Calendar Simplification for the United States, which was organized at the request of the League of Nations. He wrote articles for the cause, including "The Importance of Calendar Reform to the Business World" in Nation's Business in 1926 and "Problems of Calendar Improvement" in Scientific American in June 1931. Visitors to East Avenue were handed small cards printed with the new calendar from a pack he carried.
By 1928 Kodak kept its internal books on the thirteen-month calendar. It kept doing so until 1989, fifty-seven years after the man who installed it had died. The League held a conference on calendar reform in 1931, and then Eastman died, the world moved toward war, and the proposal disappeared. Kodak alone went on counting in four-week periods.
To call this an eccentricity would miss the point. It was the most complete expression of a temperament that the 1928 profile captured in a single image: "reserved, disciplined, and primly crystalline — as orderly as a row of gleaming test tubes." The Gregorian calendar, with its irregular months and floating weekdays, was a frivolous colloid. It produced variance. A manager could not compare March with February without adjusting for the number of Saturdays. Eastman wanted every period identical so that only the business varied. He wanted to standardize time the way he had standardized the photograph.
The same habit shows up everywhere once you look for it. Preparing for an Alaskan expedition, he packed every supply himself, weighing the parcels "balanced to the fraction of an ounce, to eliminate uneven loading which makes saddle galls on packhorses and trouble on the trail." In 1915 he founded the Bureau of Municipal Research in Rochester to gather data and recommend policy, and in 1924 he and the Bureau backed a referendum that replaced the city's political machinery with a professional city manager. The referendum passed. He was a presidential elector in 1900 and 1916, and Time put him on its cover on March 31, 1924. He governed his body, his packhorses, his workforce, his city, and the calendar by the same principle: remove the variance, and then let people press the button.
He handled succession in the same way. In 1925, at seventy, he gave up daily management and retired as president, though he stayed on as chairman. William G. Stuber became president and ran the company with Frank Lovejoy. That was the fade-out. It was orderly, staged, and deliberately incomplete.
His image got the same treatment. He gave no formal interviews and issued no pronouncements on "politics, morals, religion, economics, or the birthrate." He and the company repeatedly blocked biographers from full access to his records. A journalist named Carl W. Ackerman produced George Eastman: Founder of Kodak and the Photography Business in 1930, while its subject was still alive to approve the light. The full portrait, Elizabeth Brayer's George Eastman: A Biography, did not appear until 1996, sixty-four years after his death. It took that long for the negative to be developed by someone else.
The Latent Image
He was cremated after a funeral at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Rochester. His ashes were buried on the grounds of Kodak Park, the factory complex he had begun in 1890, and in 1934 a monument of Georgia marble was raised over them. He left his entire estate to the University of Rochester. The Depression had already cost the company 17 percent of its workforce between 1929 and 1933, and still, in 1934, Kodak employed 23,000 people. Twenty months before he died, on July 18, 1930, the company had joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It stayed there until 2004.
What he left behind worked so well that it hardly needed to change, and it did not. From the 1930s through the 1970s Kodak's business model stayed essentially the same, and the company made no mergers or acquisitions that might have brought in a new point of view. Research stayed focused on film. Polaroid and Xerox got ahead on instant photography and copying. In 1934 Kodak had briefly considered buying the patents of a young inventor named Edwin Land and decided to supply his polarized lenses instead. Land went on to build Polaroid, the first instant camera ran on Kodak emulsions, and when Kodak entered instant photography in 1976, Polaroid sued. In 1991 Kodak paid $925 million to settle, the largest patent-infringement settlement in American history to that point. Eastman's Ansco case had been a rehearsal.
The laboratory he founded kept doing what he had built it to do. It invented. In 1972 Roger Van Heyningen, director of the physics division, became convinced that digital imaging would someday replace film and set up a small lab to study the semiconductors behind charge-coupled devices. In 1975 an engineer named Steven Sasson built the first battery-powered handheld digital camera prototype, using a 10,000-pixel sensor. A physicist named Peter Dillon invented the integral color image sensor, the kind that now sits in nearly every smartphone, drone, and car camera. In 1976 Bryce Bayer patented the color-filter arrangement that most digital sensors still use. In 1979 an employee named Larry Matteson wrote a report predicting that the shift from film to digital would be complete by 2010.
He was right about the date. Executives judged that pivoting would require huge investment in a small market and would put Kodak up against established computer-hardware companies. They chose to diversify into chemicals and drugs instead, buying Sterling Drug in 1988 for $5.1 billion, an overvalued purchase that soon lost money. Revenue peaked at $16 billion in 1996. Film sales kept rising through the 1990s, long enough to make waiting look sensible, and then in 2001 they began to fall. Between 2004 and 2007 Kodak closed thirteen film plants and 130 photofinishing facilities and laid off 50,000 people. In 2009 it retired Kodachrome after seventy-four years. On January 19, 2012, Eastman Kodak filed for Chapter 11 and took a $950 million credit line from Citigroup to keep operating. It sold a large share of its patents, much of the intellectual property behind the phone camera, for about $525 million to a consortium that included Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Samsung. Between 2007 and 2018 the real GDP Rochester lost from Kodak's decline canceled out the growth of every other sector in the city combined.
The razor-and-blades model had a hidden assumption: that there would always be blades. A digital sensor is a razor that never needs another blade. The lab Eastman created to master the frivolous colloid had produced the technology that made the colloid unnecessary, and with it the shoebox, the mail-back envelope, the drugstore counter, and the second half of the slogan. With a digital camera, the person who presses the button also does the rest.
One part of the inheritance did better than its parent. After World War I disrupted supplies of methanol, acetone, and acetic acid, Eastman bought a hardwood distillation plant in Tennessee from the federal government in 1920 so that Kodak would control its own chemicals. Tennessee Eastman made acetyls. During World War II it produced a million and a half pounds of RDX a day at its peak and ran the Y-12 uranium plant at Oak Ridge. It was spun off on January 1, 1994, as Eastman Chemical, and it became a Fortune 500 company. In 2025 Eastman Chemical reported $8.75 billion in revenue. Eastman Kodak reported $1.07 billion, and a loss. The supply-chain hedge had grown roughly eight times larger than the business it was built to protect.
Film itself has survived the way old crafts do, kept alive by people who think the trouble is the point. In 2015, after a campaign organized by Christopher Nolan and joined by Spielberg, Scorsese, and Tarantino, six major studios agreed to buy Kodak motion-picture stock. Fujifilm stopped making motion-picture film in 2013, which left Kodak as the last major producer, and in 2022 Fujifilm began buying some of its color negative film from Kodak, a former enemy now a supplier, the way Eastman once turned camera makers into customers. That same year Kodak advertised for new film technicians because hobbyists had brought back the darkroom. In 2026 a Kodak-branded 35-millimeter point-and-shoot appeared with a fixed lens, a single shutter speed, and a manual advance: a box, more or less, with a button.
The house on East Avenue was the university president's residence for ten years. It opened as a museum of photography and film on November 9, 1949, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966. Its collection holds more than 400,000 photographs and negatives and 28,000 motion pictures. In 1978 a fire destroyed some of them, including the original negatives of MGM's pre-1951 cartoons. Upstairs, in a climate-controlled vault, are his correspondence, his library, his films, and his negatives, the overexposed ones included. Among the objects kept in the house are the elephant head, the Aeolian organ, and fragments of his coffin.
He is the only person with two stars in the film category on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one on Hollywood Boulevard and one on Vine Street. Both honor the same achievement, bromide paper, which became an industry standard. The man who wanted one perfectly standardized calendar is commemorated twice for one thing, and nobody has corrected it.
The museum's guidance for visitors to the grounds is brief. Photography is encouraged. The estate, it notes, is popular for family, engagement, and senior photos. On any given afternoon someone stands in a garden where a man once kept a rose bush grown from a cutting of his mother's childhood home, lifts a camera built on a sensor invented in his laboratory, and presses the button. Nothing gets mailed to Rochester. The picture is finished before the subject has a chance to blink.
Part IIThe Playbook
The principles below are drawn from the record in Part I: the decisions Eastman made, the systems he built, and in several cases the costs those systems carried long after he was gone. Some are worth copying. Some are mainly warnings. Several are both. Eastman's career is a rare case where you can see a founder's operating philosophy play out over more than a century, from the kitchen sink to Chapter 11, so the lessons come with their consequences attached.
The Eastman Principles
- 1.Sell the result, keep the process.
- 2.Profit from the repeat purchase, not the first one.
- 3.Design the name for the mouth, not the meaning.
- 4.Take the work and leave the title.
- 5.Honor the obligation you never signed.
- 6.Buy the person, not the company.
- 7.Turn your mysteries into a department.
- 8.Own the input that can strangle you.
- 9.Pay before you're asked, and know why you're paying.
- 10.Watch what your moat keeps out.
- 11.Standardize the container so the contents show.
- 12.Remember the lab can invent your replacement.
K
The Eastman Arc
Key decisions from the kitchen sink to the consent decree, and what came after.
1879
Files patent for a plate-coating machine while still a bank clerk.
1881
Eastman Dry Plate Company founded January 1; Henry Strong president, Eastman treasurer.
1885
Roll holder patented with William Walker; paper-backed "American film" patented.
1888
The Kodak: $25, 100 exposures, "You press the button, we do the rest."
1889
Nitrocellulose film patented; Edison orders 50 feet for $2.50.
1908
Kodak becomes sole film supplier to the Motion Picture Patents Company.
1912
Research Laboratories founded under Kenneth Mees; profit-sharing for all employees.
1919
Strong dies; Eastman sells stock to employees below market value.
1920
Tennessee Eastman founded to secure chemical supply.
1925
Retires as president, stays on as chairman; meets Cotsworth about the calendar.
1932
Dies March 14; estate left to the University of Rochester.
1975
Kodak's Steven Sasson builds the first handheld digital camera prototype.
2012
Eastman Kodak files for Chapter 11 on January 19.
Principle 1
Sell the result, keep the process
The 1888 Kodak was the first great product built on deciding what the customer should not have to do. Before it, photography required the photographer to be a chemist as well. Eastman divided the activity into two halves, the moment of capture and everything after, and sold only the first. Every inconvenience, the darkroom, the developer, the printing, the reloading, moved to Rochester, where it could be industrialized, standardized, and charged for.
The insight was not technical. It was a reading of the customer, whom the 1928 profile described as "lazy and impatient," with an appetite for "results, automatically delivered and ready-made." Eastman did not try to educate that customer up to the craft. He brought the craft down to the customer and put a price on the gap. The ten-dollar processing fee was, in effect, a subscription to competence the user never had to acquire.
The same move works wherever skill is a barrier to adoption. The question is not "how do we teach people to do this?" but "which half of this can we take away from them entirely?" Whoever absorbs the difficult half owns the relationship.
Tactic: List every step your customer must perform to get the result they want, then build the business around removing the hardest half and doing it for them.
Principle 2
Profit from the repeat purchase, not the first one
Eastman saw early that the camera was a one-time sale and film was a perpetual one. He organized the company around control of film, and then made a less obvious move: he supplied quality film to every camera maker. Competitors who built better cameras ended up enlarging Kodak's film market. The rivalry moved from his product to theirs, and his consumable ran through both.
The model was strong enough to last most of a century with little change, and the 1922 silver numbers, second only to the U.S. Treasury, show how much volume ran through it. Its strength was also its exposure. A business built entirely on the repeat purchase depends on the repeat purchase continuing to exist. When digital sensors removed the consumable, the model did not shrink. It vanished. Kodak's late attempt to run the model in reverse in inkjet printers, with expensive printers and cheap ink, could not save it.
R
The Consumable Logic, Then and Later
How the same model looked across Kodak's history.
| Era | Device | Consumable | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1888 | $25 Kodak box camera | Film rolls and $10 processing | Scale |
| 1900s | Rivals' cameras | Kodak film sold to every maker | Scale |
| 1908 | Edison trust's cinema | Exclusive motion-picture stock | Antitrust risk |
| 1975 | Sasson's digital prototype | None | Threat |
| 2007 | Kodak inkjet printers | Cheap ink, model inverted | Exited 2012 |
Tactic: Find the consumable in your business, make it the profit center, and then ask every year what technology could make it unnecessary.
Principle 3
Design the name for the mouth, not the meaning
Kodak was built to a specification: short, easy to say, unlike any other name, and associated with nothing. The 1920 advertisement admitted it outright: "simply invented... to meet our trademark requirements." A word with no prior meaning can be filled with whatever meaning the company gives it, and it cannot be confused with a competitor or a generic term in court. Within a generation it was a verb.
The private story, the letter K and the mother's maiden name, did not weaken the engineering. It is worth remembering, though, that the most strategic name in American business was assembled with an Anagrams set at home. A clear brief does not rule out a personal reason. It only requires that the personal reason meet the brief.
Later, "Kodak moment" entered everyday speech. It is the clearest evidence that a name designed to mean nothing ended up meaning a great deal.
Tactic: Write the functional requirements for a name first (length, ease of saying it, legal distinctness, zero borrowed associations), and choose among candidates only after they pass all of them.
Principle 4
Take the work and leave the title
For thirty-five years Eastman was treasurer of a company called by his name, while Henry Strong, a buggy-whip manufacturer sixteen years older, held the presidency. Eastman handled most executive functions. Strong supplied capital, standing, and a calm public face. The arrangement let Eastman do the work without the ceremony, and he plainly preferred it. He became president only after Strong died and gave up the title within about six years.
Founders often treat the title as the prize. Eastman treated it as a load he would rather someone else carry. A respected senior partner in the president's chair made the young company look more substantial to bankers and jobbers, and left Eastman free to spend his nights in the darkroom and his days in the factory. When he retired in 1925 he did it the same way, keeping the chairmanship and the influence while others took the daily role.
The lesson is not to hide. It is to keep power and visibility separate and give each to whoever benefits most from holding it.
Tactic: Decide which of your roles depend on the title and which on the work, and be willing to give the title to someone whose credibility does more for the company than yours would.
Principle 5
Honor the obligation you never signed
The spoiled dry plates were the founding crisis. A jobber's whole winter order went bad in storage, and there was no guaranty. Eastman ordered the plates shipped back and replaced them at a moment when his capital was small enough that the loss could have ended him. Then he went to England, bought a formula, saw it fail, and started over.
That one decision settled what the company's promise meant before the company was big enough to have a reputation. In a business built on a substance nobody fully understood, trust in the supplier was the product. A customer willing to stock Eastman plates for a season had to believe that a bad batch would be Eastman's problem and not theirs. Eastman made it his problem when he had no legal obligation to.
The cost of that kind of gesture is concrete and immediate, and the return comes slowly and can't easily be measured. That is why it is rare, and why it works.
Tactic: When a failure is clearly yours but legally isn't, make the customer whole anyway, and do it quickly enough that the decision is the story people tell.
Principle 6
Buy the person, not the company
In 1912 Kodak acquired Wratten and Wainwright for one reason: Kenneth Mees. Eastman then persuaded Mees to cross the Atlantic and found the Kodak Research Laboratories. Long before Silicon Valley named it, Eastman was doing the acqui-hire, buying a company as a way of employing a mind.
The return was very large. Mees ran Kodak research for more than four decades. He was the one man who knew all of Eastman's chemical secrets, and he led the company into color film, aerial reconnaissance, astronomy, and eventually the Manhattan Project. His lab produced the two-color Kodachrome of 1915 and, after him, the people who invented digital imaging.
The deal worked because Eastman knew exactly what he lacked, scientific understanding of a process he had mastered only by trial and error, and he bought that rather than revenue or market share.
Tactic: When a capability you can't build sits inside a small company, price the acquisition on the person and structure the deal to bring them, not the balance sheet, into the center of your organization.
Principle 7
Turn your mysteries into a department
Early photochemistry was empirical: do this and you get that, sometimes. Eastman's first business almost died of that "sometimes." His response, over thirty years, was to turn the unknown into an institution. The 1912 laboratory exists because a man who had lost a season's inventory to an unexplained failure wanted somebody employed to explain failures.
The payoff came slowly and then all at once. The lab eventually traced the mystery to the gelatin. It also produced color processes, X-ray films, and sensitivity good enough that Kodak film detected fallout from the Trinity test hundreds of miles away. A company that understands why its process works can extend it. A company that only knows that it works can only repeat it.
The point is to give your persistent uncertainties a budget, a director, and a building, and not leave them as folklore on the factory floor.
Tactic: Identify the recurring failure in your operations that nobody can fully explain, and fund a small permanent team whose only job is to understand it.
Principle 8
Own the input that can strangle you
World War I showed Eastman how fragile his supply of methanol, acetone, and acetic acid was. In 1920 he bought a hardwood distillation plant in Tennessee from the federal government to make his own. It was a defensive purchase, bought so that the next war would not stop film production.
That hedge became Eastman Chemical, which by 2025 reported revenue roughly eight times that of Eastman Kodak. The defensive asset outlived and outgrew the core business it was meant to protect, because chemistry did not depend on film continuing to exist. The silver story points the same way. A company that becomes the country's second-largest silver buyer knows exactly which input it cannot afford to lose.
Securing a critical input does more than reduce risk. It can create a second business on a base that does not share your main product's vulnerabilities.
Tactic: Map the single input whose loss would halt your production, and treat securing it as a possible business in its own right, not just an insurance cost.
Principle 9
Pay before you're asked, and know why you're paying
Eastman's welfare capitalism of workmen's compensation in 1910, profit-sharing in 1912, and below-market stock sales in 1919 produced a workforce no union organized in the entire twentieth century, with turnover around a quarter of the national manufacturing rate in the 1950s. He was explicit with himself about the reasons: to head off unions and strikes, to make the stock more attractive by spreading ownership, and to lower the share price below the antitrust radar. He also knew it was cheap. In a capital-intensive business with a low labor-cost ratio, generous benefits cost less than they appeared to.
Generosity that is also strategy is not hypocrisy. It is durable because both parties benefit. Marion Folsom carried the logic further with insurance, annuities, and a private unemployment plan, and later took it into a presidential cabinet. Rochester's other employers had to match Kodak, and the whole city's wages rose.
$
Conventional Wisdom vs. Eastman
How Eastman's choices differed from the default playbook of his era.
| Conventional wisdom | Eastman's approach |
|---|---|
| Resist worker demands until forced. | Anticipate them; pay above union scale before organizers arrive. |
| Founder keeps concentrated ownership. | Sell stock to employees below market to broaden the base. |
| Buy companies for revenue. | Buy Wratten and Wainwright for one scientist. |
| Make money on the hardware. | Make money on the film, and sell it to rivals. |
| Give publicly; name the building. | Give as "Mr. Smith"; name the hall for your mother. |
| Take the top title. | Run the company as treasurer for 35 years. |
Tactic: Before offering a benefit, write down every reason it serves the company as well as the employee; if you can't find one, it won't last, and if you can only find one, you're underpaying.
Principle 10
Watch what your moat keeps out
The loyalty Eastman built had a dark side, and it ran on the same machinery. Family hiring and a shared background made Kodak workers "a separate class" and kept unions out. They also kept out Catholic immigrants, Jews, and Black Rochesterians, who by 1939 numbered exactly one on the payroll. The same founder was the largest donor of his era to Hampton and Tuskegee, refused to meet the president of the NAACP, and funded the American Eugenics Society until he died. Kodak did not open its doors until a civil rights campaign forced the 600-worker agreement in 1967.
Homogeneity is a moat, and moats also keep things in. From the 1930s to the 1970s Kodak made no mergers or acquisitions that might have brought in new perspectives, and its research stayed fixed on film while Polaroid and Xerox moved ahead. The cohesion that made the company hard to unionize also made it hard to persuade. When a Kodak employee predicted in 1979 that digital would replace film by 2010, the organization heard him and did not change course.
A culture designed to repel outsiders will, eventually, repel outside ideas too. Leaders rarely notice when the two happen together.
Tactic: Audit who your hiring and promotion patterns systematically exclude, and treat each excluded group as a missing source of both talent and dissent.
Principle 11
Standardize the container so the contents show
The thirteen-month calendar looks like a crank's hobby until you see it as an operator's tool. With every period exactly twenty-eight days and every month starting on the same weekday, comparisons between periods carry no distortion from the calendar. Only the business varies. Kodak kept its books that way from 1928 to 1989. The same instinct shows up in his packhorse loads balanced to a fraction of an ounce, in the house's central clock network, and in his push to replace Rochester's political machine with a city manager.
Eastman's lifelong effort was to remove variance from the container so that variance in the contents could be read clearly: the moods of gelatin, labor markets, the calendar, the load on a horse. You cannot manage what you cannot compare, and you cannot compare periods of different lengths.
The world never adopted his calendar, but the principle needs no treaty from the League of Nations. Any company can choose its own measuring periods.
Tactic: Report your core metrics in identical, comparable periods, even if that means internal books that don't match the public calendar.
Principle 12
Remember the lab can invent your replacement
The laboratory Eastman founded to protect film went on to invent its successor. Sasson's handheld digital prototype in 1975, Dillon's integral color sensor, the Bayer filter in 1976, and Matteson's 1979 forecast all came from inside Kodak. Kodak was not slow to digital; it was first. What it lacked was the will to cannibalize a model that was still growing. Film sales rose through the 1990s and made waiting look sensible, until 2001, when they started to fall. By 2012 the company was in Chapter 11, selling the patents behind the phone camera for $525 million.
Eastman himself had cannibalized his own products more than once: glass plates for paper film, paper for celluloid, the mail-back camera for film that customers could load themselves. Part of his genius was a willingness to make his last success obsolete. The institution he built kept his lab and lost his appetite for that.
Research groups do what they are built to do and discover things. Whether the company acts on those discoveries depends on who controls the profit-and-loss statement, not on who runs the lab.
Tactic: Give the team developing the technology most likely to destroy your core business its own budget and a mandate to win even if that means cannibalizing the core.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— George Eastman, on the letter KIt seems a strong, incisive sort of letter.
— George Eastman, on discovering his first million in 1898I hurried home to Rochester to see my mother. 'I've got a whole million,' I told her. She said, 'That's nice,' and never mentioned it again. It did not impress her much.
— George Eastman, on his mother's maiden nameI regret that I did not take her name myself. George Kilbourn Eastman would have been better.
— George Eastman, on retiring as president of Eastman KodakThe remaining years are very precious to me, and I am now doing what the movies call a 'fade-out.'
— George Eastman, final note, March 14, 1932To my friends: my work is done. Why wait?
Maxims
- Split the craft. Sell the moment of capture and keep all the difficulty for yourself; whoever does the rest owns the customer.
- Live on the refill. The device brings in the customer, and the consumable is what pays you over time.
- Build names out of nothing. A word with no prior meaning can be given any meaning you choose and can't be taken from you in court.
- Make good on what you never promised. The spoiled batch you replace for free is how customers learn what your guarantee means.
- Acquire minds. Sometimes the right price for a company is the price of one person.
- Give mysteries a building. A failure no one understands needs a funded team, not superstition.
- Hedge the bottleneck. The plant you buy for protection may outlive the business it was meant to protect.
- Pay first, with open eyes. Generosity that also serves the company is the kind that lasts.
- Audit the gate. A culture that keeps out certain people will also keep out the ideas they would have brought.
- Fund your own obsolescence. If your lab invents what replaces you, let it beat you before a competitor does.
