George Eastman patents the first film in…

George Eastman patents the first film in roll form to prove practicable; he has been tinkering at home to develop it.

This innovation will soon help to bring photography to the mainstream, and become the basis of a manufacturing empire.

Eastman was born in Waterville, New York to George Washington Eastman and Maria Eastman (née Kilbourn), the youngest child, at the ten-acre farm which his parents had bought in 1849.

He had two older sisters, Ellen Maria and Katie.

He is largely self-educated, although he had attended a private school in Rochester after the age of eight.

His father had started a business school, the Eastman Commercial College in the early 1840's in Rochester, New York, one of the first "boomtowns" in the United States, with a rapid growth in industry.

As his father's health started deteriorating, the family had given up the farm and moved to Rochester in 1860.

His father had died of a brain disorder in May 1862.

To survive and afford George's schooling, his mother had taken in boarders.

Maria's second daughter, Katie, had contracted polio when young and died in late 1870 when George was sixteen years old; George had left school and started working.

As he began to experience success with his photography business, he vowed to repay his mother for the hardships she had endured in raising him.