Remembering A Famous Camera
"Eastman subsequently did for cameras what Steven Jobs would do for computers almost eight decades later. He put photography within the reach of almost every American family."
This month marks the quasquicentennial of a famous American invention. Until this writing, I didn’t know the word for a 125th anniversary, but “quasquicentennial” is it.
Like almost everybody today, I use a digital camera and haven’t bought a roll of film in decades. But my first camera, back in 1960, was a Kodak Box Brownie.
New York entrepreneur George Eastman first introduced the Brownie 125 years ago, in February 1900. The price tag was one dollar. Film sold for 15 cents a roll. Eastman subsequently did for cameras what Steven Jobs would do for computers almost eight decades later. He put photography within the reach of almost every American family.
He was no stranger to photography. In the 1870s, when Eastman was in his twenties, what would become the passion of his life started out as a hobby. In 1871 at the age of 17, he bought a hundred dollars’ worth of photographic equipment and hired a photographer to instruct him in the art. He read everything he could find on the subject. With a backpack and a wheelbarrow, he hauled his equipment everywhere he wanted to capture an image.
I’m sorry to say that Eastman never made it to Montana, though once in later life he planned a trip to Wyoming. He made it as far as the Dakotas, took ill, and returned home to New York. The only Eastman connection to Montana, so far as I know, is that many people here took plenty of pictures of the state’s gorgeous landscapes with a Brownie in hand.
Cameras in the 1870s were as big as microwave ovens. The tools of the professional photographer’s trade—including a bulky, unreliable camera, a tripod, and various liquid chemicals—were more than a single man could carry, “a pack-horse load,” as Eastman described it. He resolved to downsize, simplify, and reduce the cost of the “burden” of taking pictures.
A self-taught chemist, Eastman ended the era of sloppy, wet-plate photography by inventing a process that used dry chemicals, though not without many disappointments. His Eastman Dry Plate Company almost went bankrupt in the 1880s, despite his hard work and sleepless nights. But in America’s golden age of invention, when taxes were low and rewards for persistence were often great, this genius who had dropped out of school at 13 built an extraordinarily successful business.
Eastman simplified the camera into a small, easily held box measuring three and three-quarter inches high, three and a quarter-inch wide, and six and a half inches long. He needed a name for it, a catchy trademark that could be easily pronounced and spelled. “K” was his favorite letter because, he said, it was “a strong, incisive sort of letter.” After toying with various combinations of letters, he hit on one that rang some sort of internal bell in his mind, “Kodak.” But the first Kodak camera, priced at $25 when it debuted in 1888, was still unaffordable for most Americans.
Eastman worked feverishly to cut costs and improve quality. The result was a camera that would reach people, in his words, “the same way the bicycle has reached them”—the Kodak Brownie. The first mass-produced camera in history, it took the world by storm. The initial run of 5,000 cameras flew off the shelves and orders piled up at an amazing pace that exceeded the most optimistic projections.
The Kodak Brownie was a sterling example of American ingenuity and free enterprise. I wouldn’t part with mine at any price.
*****
Lawrence W. Reed writes a monthly column for the Frontier Institute in Helena, on whose board he serves. He is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education and blogs at www.lawrencewreed.com.