George Eastman
American innovator and entrepreneur
1854 CE to 1932 CE
George Eastman (July 12, 1854 – March 14, 1932) is an American innovator and entrepreneur who founds the Eastman Kodak Company and invents roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream.
Roll film is also the basis for the invention of motion picture film in 1888 by the world's first filmmakers Eadward Muybridge and Louis Le Prince, and a few years later by their followers Léon Bouly, Thomas Edison, the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès.
He is a major philanthropist, establishing the Eastman School of Music, and schools of dentistry and medicine at the University of Rochester; contributing to RIT and the construction of MIT's second campus on the Charles River; and donating to Tuskegee and Hampton universities.
In addition, he provides funds for clinics in London and other European cities to serve low-income residents.
In the last few years of his life, Eastman suffers with chronic pain and reduced functionality due to a spine illness.
On March 14, 1932 Eastman shoots himself, leaving a note which reads, "To my friends: my work is done.
Why wait?"
The George Eastman House, now operated as the International Museum of Photography and Film, has been designated a National Historic Landmark.
World
The Atlantic Lands
View →Related Events
Showing 4 events out of 4 total
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.
George Eastman registers the trademark Kodak, and receives a patent for his camera, which uses roll film, on September 4 1888, in the United States.
William Kennedy Dickson substitutes George Eastman’s tough but supple celluloid film for wax cylinders in a major breakthrough in 1889.
At age nineteen in 1879, Dickson had written a letter to American inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison seeking employment.
He was turned down.
That same year Dickson, his mother, and two sisters moved from Britain to Virginia.
In 1883 he was finally hired to work at Edison's laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey.
In 1888, Edison had conceived of a device that would do "for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear".
That October, Edison had filed a preliminary claim, known as a caveat, with the United States Patent and Trademark Office; outlining his plans for the device.
In March 1889, a second caveat is filed, in which the proposed motion picture device is given a name, the Kinetoscope.
Dickson, now the Edison company's official photographer, is assigned to turn the concept into a reality.
William Kennedy Dickson uses George Eastman’s celluloid, manufactured in long rolls, to shoot several fifteen-second films using the Edison camera, or Kinetograph, beginning in 1891.