George Eastman's baby faces its worst Kodak moment

KEEBLE McFARLANE

Saturday, January 21, 2012

He didn't invent photography - that was the work of many individuals gnawing away at the problem of how to make pictures out of light. But George Eastman was the person who pulled together all the discoveries the others had made and packaged them in a practical form that captured the public's imagination, made him a very rich man and helped build an American city. In 1880 Eastman started a company in the city of Rochester in western New York, to make dry photographic plates, which was how pictures were taken in those days. Five years later, he invented roll film and the rest, as we have seen, is history. Now, alas, the company George built faces the real possibility of itself becoming history

In building up his company, Eastman employed what's known as the razor technique - sell cheap razors to attract customers and make your profits from supplying the blades the user must keep buying. With his revolutionary roll film, Eastman in 1888 introduced a simple, inexpensive box camera which anyone could operate. It had a fixed-focus lens and each roll could take 100 pictures. That was also the year he coined the name Kodak because he loved the sound of the letter K. His sales pitch was, "You push the button, we do the rest". For most of the 20th century, Kodak dominated photography in the United States and much of the world. It came out with a string of products - film, cameras, darkroom equipment, photo chemicals, office-copying devices, X-ray film and equipment, and even invented the digital photography process which is what has brought the once-mighty company to its knees.

Eastman's company generated huge profits which he spread around. He was almost as generous a benefactor as the famous barons Carnegie and Rockefeller early in the last century, but he was much more modest about his philanthropy. Over the course of his life he gave away more than US$100 million and his donations financed the Eastman School of Music, schools of dentistry and medicine at the University of Rochester, Tuskegee and Hampton universities as well as the construction of a second campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also financed clinics in London and other European cities to assist poor people.

Kodak brought us the Brownie, the folding pocket camera, the Instamatic, cartridge film, the flash cube, Plus-X, Double X and Tri-X black and white film as well as the legendary Kodachrome colour film which made its debut in 1935 and ceased production three years ago. It was immediately snapped up by the folks at the National Geographic magazine, which from its early years concentrated on stunning photographs to illustrate its inquisitive articles by intrepid globetrotters. The singer, Paul Simon, paid tribute to the iconic product in 1973 with a song entitled "Kodachrome".

The film had two important drawbacks - it was what photographers call slow - meaning it required a lot of light, and the development process was complicated and needed special laboratories. The company fixed that with the introduction of Ektachrome - a film which could be used in a much wider range of conditions and which could be processed much more easily in simple darkrooms. The most popular incarnation of these films was for slides, and as the iPhone generation would say, Kodak had an app for that too. It was the Carousel, a slide projector which housed as many as 140 slides in a circular magazine sitting on top of the projector. On command from the person showing the slides, or from a programmed servo device, the slides drop down from the holder and light up screens large and small.

Kodak had a long association with Hollywood, which quickly adopted the 35-millimetre film - both black and white and colour - which was a mainstay on movie locations, film labs and theatre projection rooms until quite recently, when pictures encoded on to digital hard drives began elbowing the old technology aside. The 16- and 8-millimetre formats were also Kodak's doing - cheaper alternatives to the 35-millimetre film, allowing people to make home movies. Kodak has entered the language with the "Kodak moment" to signify incidents worthy of being captured for posterity.

Over the course of its long and illustrious existence, Kodak has been able to attract bright engineers and designers. In 1975, Steven Sasson, a young electrical engineer, fresh from obtaining his master's degree, took a cue from a brief conversation with a supervisor about whether it was possible to make a camera using a new type of electronic sensor known as a charge-coupled device, or CCD. The first image he and his associates captured took 23 seconds to record on to a cassette and another 23 seconds to transfer to a television monitor. It was shadowy, but it showed that digital photography was possible. A major competitor, Sony, came out with a filmless camera, the Mavica, in 1981, which recorded images on a magnetic disc. The race was now on, and Kodak soon found itself in the dust.

Rochester also gave birth to another company which invented ground-breaking products. Xerox began there in 1906 as the Haloid Photographic Company and went on to develop the famed xerographic process to copy documents using electric charges on paper and dry powder to complete the images. In 1970 Xerox set up a research lab in California known as the Palo Alto Research Centre. Its engineers designed a tool for their own use, embodying most of the basic things we are familiar with today - a modified television monitor, a mouse-type pointing device and the standard typewriter keyboard. These computer work-stations were linked by Xerox's own local area network, the ethernet. Xerox even invented the packet-switching system used to move information around via those wires.

Like Kodak, Xerox failed to see the commercial potential of its invention and others took the ball and ran with it. Now, both companies are floundering around while their competitors are constantly moving forward. Today, as many pictures are taken on multi-purpose cellphones and digital tablet devices as are taken by stand-alone cameras. Kodak did join the race and at one time right after the turn of the century was selling more digital cameras than anyone else.

But even as it sold cameras by the truckload, it lost money on each unit. It also went into digital printers, but remains at the back of the pack with Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark and others hogging the front.

Kodak's troubles are hitting Rochester's 200,000-plus residents hard. The company's work force has plunged to around 7000 from a high of more than 60,000 in Kodak's heyday. Its worldwide staff has fallen from almost 64,000 to 17,000 and its value has collapsed from some US$31 billion 15 years ago to below US$200 million.

The papers it filed in the US bankruptcy court on Thursday show that the company has just over US$5 billion in assets and US$6.75 billion in liabilities.

About the only thing Kodak can do now is to sell off the family treasures. It holds some 1100 digital patents and hopes to be able to sell enough to stave off liquidation and reorganise itself to survive in some form, albeit considerably smaller than the golden giant we have known and loved for well over a century.

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca

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George Eastman's baby faces its worst Kodak moment