Kodak built the first digital camera prototype, then went bankrupt anyway
In the mid-1970s Kodak developed the first self-contained digital camera prototype and invented integral colour image sensors. Yet the company that taught the world to take snapshots struggled through the switch from film to digital, and in January 2012 it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York.
Its founder, George Eastman, loved the letter k, calling it a strong, incisive sort of letter. With his mother he worked out the name Kodak using an Anagrams set, looking for something short, easy to say and unlike any existing word, and trademarked it in 1888. That year he also patented the Kodak camera, a simple box with a fixed-focus lens and no viewfinder.
The genius lay in the service. The $25 camera arrived loaded with film for 100 exposures; owners mailed the whole thing back to Rochester with $10 and received prints, negatives and a freshly loaded camera. The slogan You Press the Button, We Do the Rest became so familiar that Gilbert and Sullivan referenced it in Utopia, Limited. Eastman understood that film would earn more than cameras, a razor-and-blades approach that barely changed for decades.
Kodak dominated photographic film for most of the twentieth century and poured money into its research laboratories, founded in 1912. It was also a pioneer of welfare capitalism in Rochester: a compensation fund for injured workers in 1910, profit sharing for all employees in 1912, and in 1919 Eastman sold much of his own stock to staff below market value. Cameras such as the Brownie and Instamatic, and the phrase Kodak moment, made it a household name.
Trouble arrived in the late 1990s with rising competition from Fujifilm. Efforts to diversify into chemicals failed, and an aggressive pivot to digital photography and printing in the 2000s did not rescue its finances. After bankruptcy the company emerged in September 2013, smaller and restructured, making commercial printing products and motion picture film, licensing its name to other manufacturers and, in the 2020s, opening a pharmaceuticals plant.
Source: Kodak
