George Eastman: The Man Who Changed Photography

Born in the small town of Waterville, New York, George Eastman (1854–1932) soon moved with his family to Rochester, where his father, George Washington Eastman, had begun a business school called Eastman’s Commercial College. Along with running the school, the elder Eastman sold fruit trees and flowers to help make ends meet for his wife and three children.
After the family was in Rochester for two years, George Washington Eastman suddenly died. The college closed and the family was left in dire financial straits. His mother, Maria, somehow managed to keep the family together, despite the middle child, Emma Kate, suffering from polio.
Eastman, who was 7 at the time of his father’s death, stayed in school for as long as possible before it became necessary for him to get a job. He dropped out of school at 14 and took a position with an insurance firm as a messenger. At 15, he accepted a position with another insurance company, and soon began filing and even writing insurance policies. While his pay and responsibilities increased, tragedy struck the family again. Emma Kate died on Dec. 3, 1870, at the age of 20.
The Eastmans, no strangers to tragedy, pressed on. Eastman continued his work at the insurance company, but also studied accounting at nights while at home. The hope of a better paying job came to fruition in 1874, when he accepted a position as junior clerk for Rochester Savings Bank, which tripled his salary to $15 per week.
His mother’s kitchen became his laboratory, where he experimented with gelatin emulsions. At the time, glass plates covered in this emulsion were used to capture the images. Quite often, after a long night of working with his camera, Eastman awoke on the kitchen floor and then got to work. After three years of experimenting with emulsions, Eastman invented a dry plate formula, as well as a dry plate coating machine. The same year that he received his patent, he opened his own business in the Rochester financial district selling his dry plates.
As the Eastman Dry Plate Company was on the right trajectory, when Eastman was passed over for a promotion at the bank, he resigned and focused fully on his business. By 1884 and with the addition of 14 shareholders, the company was renamed Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company. Before the decade was up, Eastman and his company experienced major breakthroughs in photography, which resulted in financial success.
The same year the company name changed, in 1884, Eastman hired William H. Walker, who had been manufacturing his own dry plates and had previously invented the Walker’s Pocket Camera. The working partnership would result in the Eastman-Walker Roll Holder, which replaced individual plates with paper film photography for the next century.
The Kodak slogan became “You press the button, we do the rest.” In fact, it was precisely that. The Kodak camera cost $25 (about $830 today) and came with 100 exposures. When all the exposures were used, for $10, the customer could ship the camera to the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company in Rochester, where the company removed the film, printed the exposures, and then placed a new roll of film inside.
Despite the success of the Kodak camera, the paper film did not produce the best results. Eastman knew he had to improve on his product. Again, he hired the right person. He hired the chemist Henry Reichenbach, who created a type of transparent and flexible film. The film could be cut in strips and easily inserted into cameras. Eastman soon obtained a very famous customer: Thomas Edison, with whom he would become close friends.
With his wealth, he became a philanthropist, donating tens of millions of dollars to causes, especially to the realm of education. He donated primarily to four schools: the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hampton Institute, and Tuskegee Institute.
He was also incredibly generous to his employees by creating a “Wage Dividend,” which was a distribution to workers based on the yearly dividend of the company’s stock. In 1899, he also distributed a large sum of his own money among his employees. Twenty years later, he distributed a third of his holdings, worth approximately $10 million, among his employees. He also provided employees with life insurance, disability benefits, and a retirement annuity. He implemented these benefits well before they became common practice.
Over the course of his life, his charitable contributions to education institutions, art institutes, parks, hospitals, and dental clinics topped $100 million.