803
supply house, E. & H.T. Anthony. Later that year,
Eastman resigned from his job in the bank and devoted
himself full-time to his new enterprise. After surviving
some early setbacks, the business prospered.
In 1883, the Company moved to larger premises
in State Street, Rochester and the following year the
business became a corporation, changing its name to
the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company. The change
of name refl ected the development of a new product,
Eastman Negative Paper, which Eastman had devised
in partnership with a camera maker, William H. Walker.
Using paper as a negative support revived an idea from
the earliest days of photography. Gelatine emulsion coat-
ed paper, however, was much more sensitive than earlier
paper processes and offered a potentially attractive alter-
native to heavy and fragile glass plates. At fi rst, special
adapters enabled sheets of Eastman Negative Paper to
be used in conventional plate holders. However, to fully
exploit the possibilities of his negative paper, Eastman
and Walker also devised a rollholder which attached to
the back of a standard plate camera and contained a roll
of negative paper suffi cient for twenty four exposures.
The paper was advanced after each exposure by turning
a key. Rollholders were not a new idea. In 1854, Spencer
and Melhuish took out a British patent for a device in
which sheets of negative paper were gummed together
and wound on rollers and in 1875 Leon Warnecke
introduced a more sophisticated version which held a
one hundred exposure roll of tissue coated with a dry
collodion emulsion. These early rollholders, however,
were not commercially successful—mainly because
of imperfections of the sensitised paper. The Eastman
Walker rollholder combined precision of manufacture
with negative paper that was both sensitive and easy to
manipulate and enjoyed some popularity.
Soon after the rollholder came on the market in
1885, Eastman announced an improvement on his paper
negative fi lm, which he called “American Film.” This
consisted of a paper base coated with a layer of soluble
gelatine, then a layer of collodion and, fi nally, a gelatine
emulsion. After exposure and processing, the fi lm could
be soaked in warm water, dissolving the soluble gelatine
so that the image-bearing layer could be stripped off
and laid on glass for printing. American, or “stripping”
fi lm as it was also known, combined the lightness and
fl exibility of paper with the transparency of glass but it
was a comparatively diffi cult material to use.
To sell his range of plates, rollholders and negative
papers, Eastman looked beyond North America to the
lucrative European market. In May, 1885 an Interna-
tional Inventions Exhibition was held in London’s Albert
Hall. William Walker brought over some rollholders
and exhibited them under the title “Apparatus for the
production of negatives in the photographic camera from
continuous rolls of paper.” They won a silver medal form
the exhibition judges and received favourable reviews in
the British photographic press. Encouraged by this suc-
cess, Walker returned to London later that year to open
the company’s fi rst foreign offi ce, at 13 Soho Square.
European sales were promoted by the appointment of
“sole agents”—one of the best-known being Paul Nadar,
son of the famous French photographer, “Nadar.”
Eastman’s next move was to combine the concept of
the rollholder and paper negative fi lm with a hand-held
or “detective” camera. In 1886 he took out a joint patent
with Franklin M. Cossitt for a box-form hand camera
designed to be used with either a rollholder or conven-
tional plates. Despite the manufacturing experience
gained from production of rollholders, manufacturing
a camera proved to be both diffi cult and costly. By June
1887, only fi fty had been completed. Eastman decided
to cut his losses and sold them off to a Philadelphia
photographic dealer, W. H. Walmsey, for $50 each. Only
one example is known to have survived, and is in the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
Undeterred, Eastman immediately began work an-
other camera, putting into practice the lessons he had
learned and devising a camera in which for the fi rst time,
the rollholder was an integral part of the design. This
time he got it right. In October 1887, he wrote: “I believe
I have got the little rollholder breast camera perfected.”
The “rollholder breast camera” was put on the market
in June 1888 under a more succinct and memorable
name—“The Kodak.” In 1920, Eastman described how
he had come up with the name:
The letter “K” had been a favourite with me—it seems a
strong, incisive sort of letter. It became a question of trying
out a great number of combinations of letters that made
words starting and ending with ‘K.’ The word ‘Kodak’ is
the result. To the British Patent Offi ce he wrote: ‘This is
not a foreign name or word; it was constructed by me
to serve a defi nite purpose. It has the following merits
as a trade-mark word: First, it is short. Second, it is not
capable of mispronunciation. Third, it does not resemble
anything in the art and cannot be associated with anything
else in the art.
The Kodak camera initiated a revolution in photogra-
phy that was to quickly transform it into a truly demo-
cratic pastime within the range of everyone, regardless
of income or technical knowledge. Extremely simple
to use, it reduced taking a photograph to three simple
actions: 1. Pull the string. 2. Turn the key. 3. Press the
button. The camera itself did not embody any great
technical advances; it was not even the fi rst camera de-
signed solely to take roll-fi lm. The most revolutionary
aspect wasn’t in fact the camera, but Eastman’s concept
of separating the act of picture-taking from that of pic-
ture-making. The Kodak was sold already loaded with
fi lm for 100 exposures. After this had been exposed, the
entire camera was returned to the factory for the fi lm