George Eastman, The Man Who Put a Camera in Your Pocket

George Eastman was not a born inventor. He was a bank clerk, careful with money and methodical about everything, who became obsessed in the late eighteen seventies with making photography simpler. Cameras then were the size of furniture. The glass plates they used were fragile, heavy, and had to be coated and developed on the spot. Eastman spent years in his mother's kitchen in Rochester conducting experiments until he had a better system: a flexible roll of film that could be loaded in daylight and developed later.

In eighteen eighty-eight, the Eastman Kodak Company began selling a small black box camera pre-loaded with enough film for one hundred exposures. When the roll was done, you mailed the whole camera to Rochester. Kodak developed the pictures, reloaded the camera, and sent it back. The company's slogan was direct: You press the button, we do the rest. The price was twenty-five dollars, a week's wages for many workers, and it sold by the tens of thousands. Amateur photography, which had never before existed as a practice, was suddenly a mass phenomenon.

Eastman became one of the wealthiest men in the United States, and he gave away a remarkable share of it. He endowed a music conservatory, a dental clinic, and a medical school in Rochester. He gave tens of millions of dollars to Tuskegee University and Hampton University, the two most prominent historically Black colleges. He funded dental clinics for the poor in London and Rome. His estate on East Avenue, a Colonial Revival mansion that is now the George Eastman Museum, houses one of the oldest and largest photography collections in the world.

On the fourteenth of March, nineteen thirty-two, in intense pain from a degenerative spinal condition, Eastman shot himself and left a note. It read: To my friends: my work is done. Why wait?