See What the Oldest Surviving Kodak Camera Looks Like Now

When George Eastman first worked with cameras, they were cumbersome boxes “almost the size of a soap box.” That was in 1878 when he was 24, a bank clerk at Rochester, N. Y. Without leaving his bank job, he applied his mechanical ingenuity to making cameras handy. He succeeded.

Negatives at that time were made on wet plates, a sheet of glass covered with collodion and silver nitrate (sensitive to light) a few minutes before exposure. George Eastman, no scientist himself, tried empirically to invent dry plates covered with silver nitrate and gelatine. After trials and troubles which a thorough knowledge of colloidal chemistry, as he later learned, might have prevented, he succeeded in this effort.

Next he applied his gelatine to a strip of paper, which might be rolled compactly. And that led to a new kind of camera, the Kodak (1888). Mr. Eastman invented the name by fiddling with a batch of separate letters until he put together a group that looked alluring and sounded sensible. The word is now a common noun, verb and radical in European languages.