Speaker 1: Welcome and thank you for visiting the Informatorium 56 Podcast Studio.

This location is dedicated to general education and information and features this podcast.

I am Greg Bell and my partner Julia Korony is here with me.

How are you doing today, Julia?

Speaker 2: I am doing well and I am really looking forward to the conclusion of this two-part series.

Speaker 1: Yeah, we started off last time with the Brownie Camera series and it’s really more, you know, this series about photography leading up to the world of the Brownie camera and how that turns into a picture-taking phenomenon in modern culture.

So last time on our journey from zero pictures taken in 1820 to over one trillion a year being taken in the 2020s, we looked at the origins of capturing light through the progression to photography as a dangerous, difficult, expensive process available only to the most dedicated.

And we saw the makings of modern photography with the development of wet plate photography because despite its difficult and dangerous drawbacks, a reliable process was born, one that allowed for good quality negatives that could be used to produce numerous prints.

Then the dry plate came along and changed things.

They were safer.

No longer did you have to drag chemicals with you to your picture location and use them to create your negative and immediately after to develop your prints.

This, of course, made them easier as well.

You could just buy a dry plate and put them in a camera and take a picture.

And the exposure times got so low you could actually smile for a photo and capture action.

Being for everyone no longer means everyone who is more or less a professional.

Photography is moving into the hands of the casual user.

And as far as cheap, before I said wet plates make photography affordable in the sense that you could make a living off of them, but that’s pretty exclusive.

So where do dry plates put us on that timeline? Well, we are well past our origin of trying to capture light and we are moving through our mid-stage of the birth of photography as an expensive, unsafe, difficult task for professionals and heading toward it becoming a cheaper, super easier task for more and more users.

So let’s set the scene of the dry plate world.

With the new dry plate technology, new camera makers start producing new cameras, smaller cameras that don’t need tripods.

Let’s look at one of these as an example.

In 1881, William Walker created and began selling his Walker pocket camera and this is a really good example of where things are at this point.

He sold everything you needed to get into photography: the camera, the plates, and everything needed to develop them.

The camera was just a small box and was designed for two and three-quarter inch by three and a quarter inch plates.

And the camera itself only cost $10.

He actually advertised it as, quote, “photography made easy for everyone,” end quote.

He even made it with interchangeable standardized parts, incidentally way before Ford was on that path.

Now, it is reported that Walker himself was great with camera technology but not so great with people, which is why he will pop up again in our story, but also probably why his camera does not live on the rules today of dry plates.

But as I said, it is a good example of where things are and where they are heading.

In fact, dry plates are such a game-changer that as I said, they mark the turning point in the two parts of our story.

Modern photography is now born, no matter how you look at it.

Now we are looking at how photography gets on the path to being a global culture-changing phenomenon.

In fact, in keeping with our theme, they are so important that they change what it means to be safe, easy, cheap, and for everyone.

In essence, safe has largely been accomplished with a few caveats, but it’s no longer and will never again be a necessity to use chemicals to create your own plates for your exposures.

Now, you can do this, it’s just not going to be necessary.

Now, this new-found safety excludes a few mishaps along the way that spark a bit of danger and certainly doesn’t account for the factory conditions or workers in the new generation of companies making camera products or picture development, but for the purposes of our journey, safe is largely checked off.

Further, as far as easy, I mean things are getting much easier and now we are looking for really, really easy, like a click of a button and someone else does all the rest easy.

And by cheap, we mean cheap, like we are now looking for products that almost anyone will be able to afford, and not just the camera but also the pictures.

And by for everyone, we mean everyone.

Photos have already impacted the culture.

They are permanent hard copies of memories that will be treasured for the rest of time.

So now we turn on the path to ubiquity, the path from recording memories to a device that will essentially be capable of making culture, the snapshot as it aptly comes to be called, the devices that will be capable of capturing the perfect split second of life that everyone seems to reach for today, the fuel of our modern social media fire, the path to over one trillion photos a year, what I call the difference between photography and picture-taking.

So how do we get there? Well, let’s look at today’s rundown.

First, since we already got to dry plates in our timeline, we have to introduce the most important character in our story, who is going to be George Eastman.

And we’re going to back up in time a bit to see where he comes from and how he gets to be who he is.

It’s not really a detour because of how important it is, I think we should call it maybe a pre-tour.

So we will start out with a short bio on his early life leading him to the world of photography.

Then, spoiler alert, Eastman is going to be the one who gets us our really easy, super cheap camera that is almost literally for everyone, at least who wants to use it.

So we will look at how Eastman and his company of top-notch employees make that happen.

And the path we will take is first, Eastman and dry plates, which means dry plate photography, which is more or less the standard when Eastman enters the world of photography, and we will look at his role in its production.

Second will be film, and here we are talking about the development of film to replace plates as the light-sensitive material in cameras.

The film will start as a paper-backed lower quality product and evolve into a transparent product anyone who owned a camera before cell phones would be familiar with.

Then we look at the path to really cheap affordable cameras.

In this section, we will look at the Kodak camera, which starts out as the name for a camera, not a company.

Then we’ll add super easy, Eastman’s ultimate stab at easy, the creation of the “you press the button, we do the rest” process, which allows people to get pictures printed without doing any work.

And finally, the birth of picture-taking, which we will use the Brownie as the model for, as the creation that epitomizes the success of Eastman’s process, the Brownie camera, the true seminal leap from photography to picture-taking.

And that’s because the Brownie has all the elements: it’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s for everybody.

And by for everyone, here we’re going to actually look at how Eastman made it appealing to everyone, including the most casual users, by reviewing the successful branding and advertising of the product and the intentional plan to get it in the hands of kids to make picture-taking a part of modern life for the foreseeable future.

We will also take a quick detour about the Kodak Girl and have a fun section on the Brownie characters that give the Brownie its name, which are just adorable.

And of course, at the end, we will chat about some of the cultural ramifications as they exist today before ending the show.

So let’s dive in and find out who is this George Eastman guy and how did he get into photography? Do you have any thoughts on George Eastman coming into the show, Julia? Do you have any memories or did you learn about him in school or anything?

Speaker 2: No, I did not.

I did not know who he was.

I’ve heard the name before but I’ve never really looked into it or know who he actually is.

Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s kind of weird because the company’s always called Eastman in some way or another as we go through, he changes the name of his company a lot, but it’s always, you know, it’s Eastman Kodak.

And even in a book I’m going to reference here, they point out some things about his life and like why he maybe isn’t individually as popular, that’s why I was kind of wondering if you would have heard about him growing up with your education being in another country.

Honestly, I don’t feel like he got much play here.

It’s not like he’s, you know, hidden or anything, but he’s definitely, he’s not held up there with these other like huge industrialist magnates like, you know, Vanderbilt and these business people.

Speaker 2: I was thinking of someone like Bell.

Speaker 1: See, yeah, he does kind of straddle the fence because he’s making all these products but he also creates this huge company that just he pushes and drives to make a monopoly out of the entire industry that basically he kind of made up.

You know what I mean? Like I said, there’s a lot of people involved but he does an enormous part to make this happen, sacrificing his own wealth at times.

And it’s kind of a weird thing that he’s not quite as well known as some of these other figures.

Now, George is obviously the driving force that puts cameras in everyone’s hand, which eventually results in our world of picture-taking.

And his early life leading up to his involvement in photography really shows you how he became the person that does that.

So let’s take a trip to his early life and see some of those precursors that made a George Eastman.

And much of this section comes from the book by Elizabeth Brayer called “George Eastman: A Biography,” which I just referenced.

Interestingly, in her book, she claims that in later life, it turns out Eastman’s intense interest in privacy led to no real accurate biographies being written about him in his lifetime.

She even explains that he okayed one being written but ends up financing it and then having the final say on what went in the book and removed anything about his personal life before it was published.

Speaker 2: So maybe that’s why people don’t know about him.

Speaker 1: Well, it is, like he didn’t want them to know about him, you know what I mean? But now, paradoxically, he also recorded everything he ever did.

And Brayer got access to these recordings from the George Eastman House, which is Eastman’s home.

He basically set up a fund for it to be taken care of after he passed and it ends up being turned into a museum.

So you hear it called the George Eastman House, the George Eastman Museum, you know, it’s the same building and it is where he lived in Rochester.

And she had access to all these documents and it might seem that’s a little bit biased, but honestly, in reading the book, it’s not all just flattery.

So, you know, we’re going to go with her account, especially because, you know, it’s the closest thing to a first-hand account we’re going to get.

And some of the stuff she brings up is a little hard to double-check because that’s the source, right?

Speaker 2: Right, because this is all just from him, if he…

Speaker 1: Well, no, she, I mean, the book she writes, my goodness, it’s like 750 pages.

It covers like everything.

And she does have other sources.

It’s just the stuff about his actual life, there’s no, you know, people, you know…

Speaker 2: There weren’t like articles in newspapers about him or stuff like that that you can double-check with what he’s saying.

Speaker 1: Right, you can read all kinds of stuff about him, you know what I mean? But it’s just in essence, there’s no serious like first-hand account of the intimacies of his life.

So, you know, obviously all the business he did is public record and stuff like that.

So let’s start out with George’s early life.

In 1854, he was born in Waterville, New York, and he would call the state his home his whole life.

His father was George Washington Eastman.

And normally I don’t get into people’s families, but in this case, we will see there seems to be a pretty clear-cut case that they made him who he was.

George’s mother, Maria Kilbourn Eastman, would be the rock in George’s life and would live with him until her passing in 1907.

So George’s father actually started a commercial college in Rochester the year George was born and would do much to form the man George would become, as much because of what he wasn’t as what he was as a father.

His father worked most of the year at the university, which was apparently a very practical, hands-on commercial education college.

And on the weekends, he would spend most of his time tending to the nursery business, which they also had.

In other words, he didn’t spend much time with George.

He was quoted as saying, his father, “I wouldn’t have a child of mine that couldn’t do any sort of errand after it was five years old.” And apparently, young George had been going along with his sister on banking business from the time of infancy.

Now, it may sound like George was born into a cushy childhood, and he may have been, but it doesn’t last.

In fact, later in life, he would be quoted as saying, “I never smiled until I was 40.

Since then, I have tried to win back something of the fun that other men had when they were boys.”

Speaker 2: Oh, that’s so sad.

That is so sad.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and we’ll see he does actually do a lot of things when he’s younger, but I guess maybe what he meant is like he didn’t get the enjoyment out of it.

Speaker 2: It sounds like he didn’t have the childhood that, you know, other kids had, you know, if he had to go what he thought of as work with his dad.

Speaker 1: Right, and even though it does, he does get some of the benefits of his work way before that, at the same time, that doesn’t mean he inside, you know, was a whole person, right? Like I think we all know that there’s more complications to life than that.

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 1: And basically, you will see though that he does like spend his money.

He doesn’t become miserly.

He ends up giving away, we don’t really get into the end of his life or anything, but he ends up giving up tons of money away to like historically black universities.

He donates just millions of dollars to them.

He’s really like into helping out other people.

So he doesn’t really ever become just interested in money for money’s sake as far as I can tell.

Like I said, every time he has the opportunity, if it comes down to it, he puts it back into his business as opposed to like walking away and saying, “Hey, I’m good.”

Speaker 2: Right, or selling it and cashing out.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s just the type of person he is.

And we’ll see things get pretty bad here from time to time for him.

So, well, anyway, eventually, in an interesting theme in his life, you may find that such a driven person would be really boring, but like I said, he’s not actually boring.

He does do fun things, seemingly fun things, I can’t say what his perspective was.

But he does record all these things and we get to see them throughout his life.

As for his father’s business, unfortunately, before his business bore too much fruit, his father started becoming ill in 1860, at which point they gave up the nursery.

And the rest of the family had to leave the rural Waterville life and move to Rochester with the elder Eastman where the college was.

And this was a much more urban setting, which George doesn’t initially seem to be a fan of.

There’s a lot of resentment here towards his father for some of these things.

Then in 1863, his father suddenly passed.

To sum up his childhood, Brayer in her biography does it well, she puts it like this: “Two months shy of his eighth birthday, the heir of a well-off if not affluent family, he had suddenly to make his way hampered by genteel poverty.” His father’s death forced him into an early and remarkable self-reliance.

Eastman’s contemporaries remembered too that he harbored resentment towards his father, particularly for the debts that he had incurred.

And I will point out that the genteel part is added.

She in the book kind of makes it apparent that Eastman’s memory of how things went is not exactly in…

Speaker 2: Right, well, he’s eight.

Speaker 1: Well, as I alluded to earlier, even by the time he’s 40, he’s like, “I’m still unhappy even though, you know, necessarily things weren’t quite as hard as he remembered them.” Now, George’s relationship with his mom is a different story.

So at 41, with the passing of his father, his mother was a widow with George and his two sisters.

And she was forced to take in boarders to pay for George to go to a local private school.

George actually quit school in 1868 when he was about 14 to take on work.

And again, she says there’s this mythos that like he was poverty-stricken, but according to her, it seemed the story was his memory and not really reality and he really probably could have finished school because his mother did have income coming in.

But he decides to quit.

He gets a job cleaning and helping out at an office making $3 a week.

And he seemed to revel in being independent.

Interestingly, he accounted all of his expenditures from a young age, as I said.

So you can actually see the things he was doing and he was taking dance lessons, he was traveling, he started a lifelong interest in fitness, he signed up at a gym.

Speaker 2: Well, it kind of sounds like he just went and did what he wanted to do whereas maybe his mom was like, “No, you have to do this and follow in your father’s footsteps,” perhaps, I don’t know.

And then she, he just kind of like was like, “No, I’m going to go do this.”

Speaker 1: No, she is like the love of his life.

Like she literally is like just all about him as far as I can tell.

Again, I don’t know these people, but yeah, she takes care of him.

She’s like his emotional rock.

Speaker 2: Okay, so she’s very supportive.

Speaker 1: Okay, I think it’s kind of the other side of the coin of his father, right? Because his father’s the accountant and he’s taken down all these, you know, notes and everything all the time.

But it also may be that with his passing he’s like, “Look, I’m going to at least do things.” You know what I mean? Because obviously that’s in his mind if when he’s 40 he’s like, “Then I really started to push for it.” So I think he’s just like, “Look, nobody’s promised tomorrow, I’m going to at least do these things.”

Speaker 2: And maybe he didn’t want to turn up like his dad where he just did all this just one thing and he wanted to experience more things.

Speaker 1: Exactly.

As for the rest of his family, he had sisters, as I said, but his one sister was married and moved to Cleveland and another one had passed from a childhood illness, she had polio at a young age and then this left her prone to other illnesses.

So at this point, it was him and his doting mother who would live with him for the rest of her life, as I said, on their own, so to speak.

Because side note, despite apparent interests and relationships, he never gets married.

So and this sets the scene for the environment in which his greatness was to follow.

So at that point, let’s jump ahead from the family to George’s early 20s, around 1877, where things in his professional life start to happen.

George was obviously a go-getter and self-reliant.

Eventually, he got a job working in insurance.

Even though money is relative, I always actually think it’s kind of interesting to go back and hear what people were making.

It’s interesting to know like, “Oh, he was making $10 a week,” but…

Speaker 2: He was well off.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and George was actually making $41.66 a month in insurance.

He was also making $8 a month as a fireman.

So you’re going to see early on, this guy, he’s got more time than a clock.

I don’t know what he does, like he just gets so many things done, it’s amazing.

Now, this is actually pretty good because at the

 Time, the average annual salary was $350 a year.

So, you know, he’s well over that.

So he’s doing pretty good.

Then one day, a boarder at his mother’s home let him know that a bank was about to hire a new employee.

So George applies.

He beats out seven other candidates for the job and gets it.

Speaker 2: Oh, how about that?

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Now his salary jumps to $58 a month.

Speaker 2: Holy moly!

Speaker 1: Yeah, and before long, it actually gets up to a thousand a year, which is like $83 a month.

So now for a young man, he’s rolling in it, right? I mean…

Speaker 2: So he’s like in his 20s making…

Speaker 1: Yeah, and not quite rolling in it, but I mean, he’s doing pretty good.

He’s on a good path at the very least, you know.

And this is important because this is like a real career.

And that’s going to be a factor coming up.

So what I love personally is that because he kept that ledger, like I said, you can see these things he’s spending.

And he soon records that he bought works of art, he rented another home for him and his mom, and he even gifted money to an injured boy he met, which he just keeps track of all of this.

And in this case, it’s, you know, it’s not really self-congratulatory.

He’s just actually keeping track because as I said, he gives away millions of dollars in the future.

I mean, it’s just it’s who he is.

Speaker 2: Right.

He just wants to see money coming in, money going out.

Speaker 1: He’s just keeping track of it, exactly.

So, but then we get to find out, you know, even when he was younger, he was helping out other people.

So you might be wondering, how does this all lead to photography, right? Well, like we said, photography wasn’t cheap.

So if there wasn’t this salary and he didn’t have all this money coming in, he wasn’t going to be getting into photography no matter what he did, right? But because he had some cash, he’s actually looking of all things to invest it in some property in Santo Domingo.

Speaker 2: In the Dominican Republic?

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Now, why would he want to do this? Well…

Speaker 2: Sugarcane?

Speaker 1: No, it turns out Grant, who was president at the time, was looking into building a naval base there.

So people who knew about this were looking to buy surrounding property to make a profit off of the ensuing increase in value.

Speaker 2: Oh, right.

Insider trading.

I don’t know.

Speaker 1: That’s not it.

I mean, it’s, you know, clearly I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.

It’s just you had to know what was going on.

So, and what comes next is a pretty significant turning point in his life and history at large.

According to Barrere, George discussed his potential, and I say that again because I’ve actually seen this in other books, but they quoted her.

So it’s like this is her story as far as I can tell.

So again, this is probably coming from his records.

So George discussed his potential trip with a fellow bank employee who had been assistant to a photographer with the famous Powell survey of the Grand Canyon in 1871.

The colleague suggested that taking a camera on his scouting trip would be the best way to record the island.

And things are coming full circle there because like I said, now we’re living in a world where people are taking pictures of things and it’s changing culture.

And that culture’s coming back and it’s getting dropped into a guy who’s about to really change the culture.

And George does this.

He buys himself a camera.

He went to a photographic shop and purchased a wet plate setup for $49.58.

Now this is a wet plate setup, so remember he’s got to do the dance with the plates and all that stuff to use it.

But he got a 5×8 inch camera box, a tripod, a darkroom tent, and 24 other related items, including like plate holders, nitrate baths, water containers, and all that.

Now…

Speaker 2: Interesting.

He bought that trunk you were talking about.

Speaker 1: Exactly.

The voyage to Hispaniola never came off.

Speaker 2: What?

Speaker 1: Right.

Speaker 2: So he builds it up and he never goes to Santo Domingo?

Speaker 1: But it doesn’t matter because in George’s words, quote, “In making ready, I became totally absorbed in photography.” So that may be why he didn’t take off on the trip, you know, it may be another reason.

But anyway…

Speaker 2: He was like, there’s stuff I gotta capture here.

Speaker 1: Yeah, the point is he’s into the photography.

And he’s taking it on trips and people are coming to gawk at it because, you know, it’s really uncommon at this point.

But he takes lessons from the only two amateurs in Rochester, you know, he’s doing everything he can.

And soon he realizes that photography is his future.

He’s going to set out to liberate photography from the wet plate process.

Now, like I said, dry plates came about in 1871 and gained popularity pretty quick, but not instantaneously.

I mean, you know, there’s always a transition with these things which I mentioned earlier.

You know, I mean, think about how long it took people to start using cell phones, right? Like it’s never like overnight.

But George is going to be a part of this process.

And by a quirk of fate, or more specifically, it’s actually nepotism, he will soon be jumping in full bore into the world of photography.

But first, let’s see how he starts his inevitable march to greatness in the early dry plate industry.

So now that George is obsessed with photography, he does what anyone in his situation would do in the late 1800s, which I’m sure you know what that is, Julia.

No, he he buys trade magazines, because what else are you going to do? You know what I mean? There’s no…

Speaker 2: Well, I was going to say, did he get like a subscription to Photographer Monthly or something?

Speaker 1: He it’s all everything is and this all these things about this story that I put in here, they’re all I’m trying to use things that are going to end up being different after he gets through the world of photography.

So right now it’s trade magazines and stuff like that.

I mean, you know, what else is he going to do? So in reading these, he learned about dry plate processes that were being attempted and tried his own.

So at first, this is just for his own use.

He just wants to be a photographer, take pictures at the very least.

But then, as we said, he starts to think bigger.

He’s like, what if I start selling these? Now, apparently he ends up spending every second not at his bank job working on this project at his home.

And his mother would find him asleep on the floor in the morning.

Speaker 2: Well, that’s not good.

Speaker 1: Right.

He’s like an obsessive guy.

He studied constantly.

He said he’s asking anybody he can for tips.

You know, he finds the local amateurs, he does what he can, he’s reading his journals.

And he actually came up with a working formula of ripened gelatin and silver bromide.

So that’s going to be the formula that he puts on his plate, right? And this is based on another man’s formula, a Charles Bennett.

And if you remember from our last episode, basically, you know, you’re just taking a glass plate and you’re coating them with a light-sensitive emulsion and then you suspend silver in that to make the plate use for your negatives, right?

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 1: Makes sense.

And then use that negative, the glass plate, to make your images with later on.

Now, initially, George was applying his solution with a tea kettle and just spreading it.

And he knew he needed a more uniform process.

Like I said, this is, you know, just think of the time period.

This is the solution.

It’s like, well, I’ll take a tea kettle.

It’s a bit of a mess.

So he actually devised his own machine.

He basically created a rig where suction cups, remember this is all in his house, held the glass plate and took it across a roller while sitting in the melted emulsion.

The glass then dried and he cut it up into smaller usable plates.

Speaker 2: Oh.

Speaker 1: Right.

So he’s like he’s not just sitting around, right? Like this is not, you know, this isn’t somebody that’s just letting it come to him.

Speaker 2: But did he get fired from his bank job?

Speaker 1: No.

No, he’s still doing his bank job.

That’s what I’m saying.

Don’t worry, I allude to it earlier what’s going to go on here.

But he, you know, like I said, you know, he’s jumping in and making stuff.

And I I love this, right? Because this is like the gumption that you like wish like at least I do, wish I had sometimes.

You’re like, oh yeah, because you have these ideas.

But I mean, this guy’s just like, yeah, this is going to happen.

And then he tried to patent this in England and sell it there so he could finance his future businesses.

And this is actually a significant thing as well because for a long time, starting right now, George is relentless about commercializing his products and just as hell-bent on dominating control of them like through legal means and any other means he can use.

So he went to visit Bennett’s company in England.

Now, this company was making dry plates and they couldn’t keep up with orders despite having 18 employees coating them by hand.

So George tries to sell or license his machine to Bennett, but this whole thing doesn’t go as fast as he wants to and it’s time for him to come home before a deal gets done.

And you realize like patience is not George’s thing.

He needs things to happen.

Speaker 2: Well, it’s also a two-week, like what, a seven-day boat ride.

Speaker 1: Right.

So he’s like, I gotta get out of here.

This is the best part though.

As the negotiations go on, he’s actually at home making improvements on his device and filing new patents that theoretically would make this original device completely obsolete.

But he’s still trying to sell it to them.

So he’s just always working his angles.

But George does start selling dry plates.

And things are going well enough that he has to expand, like out of his mom’s basement and into a real business, right? Like I mean, it’s his business, it’s his basement.

He’s…

Speaker 2: Right.

He’s renting it.

Speaker 1: He’s paying for it.

But they still have the other house.

Speaker 2: It doesn’t sound as funny.

Speaker 1: No, this is his house.

This is it.

Like this it’s just him and his mom, what I’m saying.

Him and his mom living in this place in Rochester.

So he moves his setup into a room that he rented in 1880 and starts making his dry plates and selling them to like those in the know, like pros, previous contacts, people like that.

So at this point, important to note, his mindset is selling things to basically professionals because that’s the world, right? That’s that’s who’s in photography.

There’s not really anybody else.

But his business is working, people like his products at first.

So his life is more or less banking in the morning and then over to his dry plate studio and working all night.

Where he’s I mean, he’s running the whole process.

He’s running the business, he’s the inventor, he’s improving his inventions, he’s production, he’s bookkeeping.

And by the end of 1881, he has to expand.

And now he includes 16 employees.

Now, I’m not sure how great his plates really were because it seems like at first, though people liked them and he gets a, you know, a business going, contemporary accounts show that they quickly realized like he actually had the same problems that everybody else had, which were streaks in the emulsion, which any kind of thing as we said, like in the wet plates, if you got dirt in it when you were making it, that showed up in the picture.

It’s the same thing with the dry plates obviously, you know, when you go off to develop it later, if there’s already a piece of dirt in there stuck when it got exposed, you’re going to see that in your picture.

His machine never really seems to work either.

It’s not better than any other method.

So it’s not really any kind of improvement.

But on the upside, he has some sales contracts and he is expanding.

I mean, it to clarify, it’s not like there is some great product out there, right? Like it’s not like he’s the only one with these problems.

It’s just a tough thing to make.

So but that’s the situation he’s in.

And that situation is he has some issues, he has dry plate competitors, and on top of that, he also has wet plate competitors because like I said, a lot of the pros are still using those because they don’t think the dry plates are good enough.

So we have some hiccups.

What’s the best thing to take care of hiccups?

Speaker 2: Cash.

Speaker 1: Always cash.

What he needs is cash.

And luckily for George, about this time he meets a man named Henry Strong, who really likes George and his product.

And Henry has a ton of money and starts investing in George’s ideas.

In fact, this would be a decades-long relationship and Henry would actually become president of George’s company, which on December 23rd, 1880, George first George’s first company is formed.

The Eastman Dry Plate Company.

Like I said, it’s always got his name in it.

Eastman is officially treasurer and Strong is president.

So let’s learn about this Eastman Dry Plate Company.

George spent this first couple years of the company working around the clock.

Same thing he was doing before.

Six days a week between working at the bank, still working at the bank, and then trying to perfect his machine and improvement.

Now, amazingly, as I brought up before, he still finds time to do other things.

So he’s relaxing, he’s socializing with the Strongs.

He has a record where he bought new bicycles for him and two of his friends.

He’s visiting his two favorite cousins near the farm where he grew up on as a child.

Speaker 2: Well, that’s nice.

Speaker 1: Yeah, he’s he it’s weird because he’s depicted as this person at the same time that nobody knows, but he also has these close relationships.

You know, it’s like he spends time with this woman, this other woman’s interested in him, if you go through the and then he never gets married.

He has one interest that moves away and there was some speculation that like that was the love of his life because he ends up talking about her again like 20 years later.

But you know, he it’s weird because it’s just this dichotomy between not knowing what’s going on in his life, but there being all these indications that he also had, you know, these…

Speaker 2: He actually had a life.

Speaker 1: He had these healthy relationships.

Yeah, which I said also beyond that, just the amazing part of how he has time to do it.

Which is like I said, that’s I mean, that’s why I’m jealous of him, right? Like it it’s weird that he’s doing all these things.

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 1: Like if you want to make something, you can just go out there and like start tinkering, right?

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 1: Whereas like now, like you can’t really do that.

Speaker 2: No.

Speaker 1: Because it’s like either A, there’s already seven people making the same thing, or B, you just like draw it up on your computer and like Alibaba sends you a thousand of them a week later.

Right? Like like this is a different time period which I think I’m even more jealous of where you can just tinker and come up with things and feel that genuine creativity as you’re doing it.

But anyway, back to George.

At the close of 1881, George is making bank at the bank, so to speak.

Speaker 2: So he’s promoted?

Speaker 1: He’s he’s doing well.

Okay.

But also a decent sum out of his side business.

So the dry plate company with all these employees, I don’t know if you can even call it a side business.

But he actually netted $4,000 in his first two years.

So actually profited $4,000.

Of course, with hindsight, we know this is not going to go on very long, right? Like you’re not going to build what’s going to become the Kodak company while you’re working at a bank all week.

Like no matter how motivated you are, there’s a there’s a breaking point here.

Speaker 2: Plus you gotta ride your bike to your cousin’s house.

Speaker 1: Right, and he’s doing things on his own.

Like there’s there’s just a limit to reality here, right? But at the time, whether or not to go all in on the photography business, that’s actually a big decision, right? So what’s going to force him to make this decision? Well, in the midst of all of this, this is where we get the nepotism.

So believe it or not, despite all this stuff he’s doing, George actually applied for a promotion at the bank when his supervisor quit.

Speaker 2: Oh.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

I mean, it’s like Ryan Seacrest, right? Like are the three of them, how’s he doing this and this at the same time? Anyway, he didn’t get the job.

Instead, a relative of one of the bank directors got it.

So, you know, we have our nepotism.

So what does George do?

Speaker 2: He gets out of there.

He’s like, screw this.

Speaker 1: Yeah, he quit.

Which I mean, I can relate to that.

I’ve totally my move.

I’ve quit so many jobs I can’t even count them anymore.

But unlike my path, even this decision here will actually be a life event that forms the man that George Eastman becomes.

Because at this point, he vowed that there would be no nepotism in his company.

Because apparently he was still angry about this years later when he was asked about it.

This is the turning point in his life.

He abandoned the notion of having a safety net and went all in on his company.

And this would remain his his mentality for a long time.

In the future, like I said, he also often reinvests his own money in the company when it’s needed.

He’s always trying to expand, never trying to cash out.

My favorite part of the story, while he’s quitting his job, a coworker criticized him by saying you don’t give up a career for a will-o’-the-wisp.

I love that so much.

I mean, you can only assume that that statement was accompanied by an aggressive wag of the finger.

I love the old-timey phrases.

This actually came up on Jeopardy the other day, which was like a heck of a coincidence.

But a will-o’-the-wisp is it’s a flame-like phosphorescence caused by gases from decaying plants in marshy areas.

Isn’t that amazing?

Speaker 2: I remember it from the Jeopardy question.

Speaker 1: Yeah, so it said foolish travelers were said to try to follow the light and were led astray into the marsh.

That’s from Webster’s, that’s their explanation.

But this illustrates what a huge decision it was, right? That’s actually why I included this because the other people, there’s an account of a guy saying, what are you doing, Eastman? Like you don’t leave a bank job to go off on some crazy idea about making photographs that nobody wants.

And I mean, think about it, what’s the hardest career decision you ever had to make?

Speaker 2: I mean, nothing like he had to make.

I’ve been at my job for a long time now, so I don’t know that I’ve had to make a really hard decision.

Speaker 1: Yeah, but think about it if it was like, hey, I gotta leave this job that like you said, you’ve been at forever.

I mean, that’s not it’s a big deal.

Speaker 2: No, it’s hard.

I don’t know that I could do it.

Speaker 1: It’s a big deal, right? Yeah.

Anyway, as for George, I mean, he applied for that promotion, which is I mean, it’s not the action of a man who was planning on going all in on his side business, I don’t think.

Like I said, it’s easy to look back and say, of course, that’s what you would do.

Oh yeah, you just go and build Kodak.

But I mean, this is real life and I just think it’s interesting to like stop and put yourself in his shoes for a minute, you know.

This is a guy whose father’s business and health drag him out of his rural bliss and he just gets dumped on with debt.

So I mean, it’s a real decision at the time.

But it goes to a kind of person he is and we know what he does.

He quits his stable job on September 5th, 1881, and it’s full speed ahead with the Eastman Dry Plate Company.

Speaker 2: That’s exciting.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve changed it out a few changed jobs a few times and I’ve always felt secure in going on to the next one, but I’ve never just taken everything I had and like tried to dump it into a business.

So it, you know, it just shows the character of the guy and what it, you know, how driven he is, I believe.

Speaker 2: And how much he believed in this.

Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.

I mean, he’s definitely, yeah, like I said, time and time again, you see how much he believes in it.

And we’re going to find out another example of that in a second.

But with this new financing and his added time in hand, George builds a new home for his company.

A four-story building filled with the latest technology.

Speaker 2: So he really went all in.

Speaker 1: This is another thing with this guy, you know.

I mean, he’s always trying to get the best people, the best stuff.

And, you know, apparently most people liked working for him.

There’s a few exceptions and a notable one that comes up.

But he filled this with everything he could.

It had electric lights, it had air conditioning for storage areas, it had a drying room, and it had a power plant with two one-horsepower engines.

Apparently he only needed one, he got two just to make sure there weren’t any issues.

And the timing of this significant expansion is perfect because business disaster strikes immediately thereafter.

Speaker 2: Oh no.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Now, there’s an issue with his plates.

Like I said, in the beginning it kind of sounded like, oh yeah, this is great and then there’s some issues and they all kind of have issues, but he runs into a big issue.

And I say the timing’s perfect because as the casual observer, I gotta wonder, you know, like would the expansion have taken place if things were the other way around, the disaster strikes?

Speaker 2: Right.

He’s probably still at his bank job.

Speaker 1: And who knows? I mean, I think, you know, knowing who he is, but does it delay things? Does it give someone else an edge? Does it, you know, it’s just one of those like little quirks in history where you just think how if you flip things around.

But like I said, he’s pretty driven, so my guess is eventually he gets there.

But it’s interesting that, you know, soon after he does this, he runs into just an enormous problem.

Speaker 2: What’s the problem?

Speaker 1: Well, the problem is his plates, like all the plates, like I said, they have certain issues with them, but his he can’t figure out what it is.

And it’s an ongoing thing.

So what does he do? He jumps into it to find out what exactly is happening, you know, with the same fervor he does everything else.

But now he’s got this, you know, fledgling growing company on the line.

And apparently the company was almost broke.

So he locks himself into his manufacturing building to test over 450 new formulas for his emulsions.

And by emulsions, you know what I mean, just the stuff that he’s putting on his plates, right?

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 2: The gel thing.

Speaker 1: They all call it that in the books and I started doing that too, but they just mean like the mix you’re making to put your, you know, your light-sensitive material in and attach to the plate.

So 450 new formulas, can’t figure it out.\

Speaker 1: Next, he steams over to England and goes on to see his friends over there.

He has two contacts, their names are Morrison and Swan.

I didn’t track all the companies here.

He deals with a few different places and some of them are the same place and the contacts changed, but anyway, he’s got two guys over there and they let him play in their lab for a little bit so he can try to figure out what’s going on.

And he does.

His gelatin was flawed.

Speaker 2: So his own mix of the gelatin, whatever he came up with?

Speaker 1: No, the actual gelatin that he’s buying.

So it’s a gelatin coating that you take your stuff and you suspend in it.

Like the dry plates are again, glass coated with silver salts that is suspended in a bromide gelatin.

So like his mixture goes into this gelatin and that’s what he puts on the plates.

It turns out his supplier changed the source of the gelatin.

Interesting little side story here, well, quick story here.

It wasn’t until 40 years later that a scientist at Kodak labs figured out what the actual issue was.

Speaker 2: That’s wow.

They’re not even doing dry plates at that point.

Speaker 1: No, somebody obviously went back to figure out what it was.

But this is what I’m talking about with the science.

I said, you know, these guys aren’t chemists, like they’re doing chemistry, but they’re not what we think of as chemists where you can figure everything out in advance and then just, you know, you put it together and boom, there it is.

This is, you know, the early going of those stages.

So until 40 years go by, nobody actually ever finds out what the problem was.

And it turns out, like I said, it’s these subtle things.

The sulfur mix was apparently off in the gelatin and sulfur somehow it’s needed to speed up the emulsion, but it also like contradictorily results in no light sensitivity if it’s not the right mixture.

So it’s like this really subtle balance that you have to hit and apparently they just got it by accident in the original product.

So the content has to be exact, they just lucked out, the guy changed the source, they didn’t realize what was going on, all of a sudden nothing works.

Speaker 2: Oh.

Speaker 1: So at the time, they just went back to the old source, they just after they figured it out, not a big deal.

But again, this is how subtle the chemistry can be in the original world of photography.

It’s trial and error and brute force more than science.

But anyway, while George is in England, he takes the opportunity to learn everything about their emulsion techniques in exchange for him giving him, giving them the rights to his dry plate manufacturing machine.

So at least he got something out of it.

And at this point, almost insolvent, he’s able to make new plates and sells them at reduced cost to get back into the good graces of his customers and finally the disaster is over.

Speaker 2: That’s pretty savvy.

Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.

He’s always worried about and he even says, there’s a quote from him here to wrap up this section, he says, “Making good on those plates took our last dollar.

But what we had left was more important: reputation.” And of all the things you can say about him, he’s definitely worried about that, you know, because that’s how you make business happen, right? He’s very worried about that.

Speaker 2: Yeah, he wants to be the best name in the business.

Speaker 1: Yeah, he wants to be the only name in the business.

But yeah, he definitely wants to keep that reputation.

The amazing thing is all of this is simply a means to an end.

Remember, the dry plates aren’t great.

He has competitors, he was still fighting off wet plate competitors selling to professionals.

This is where we see what will become Eastman’s true plan emerge.

George has plans in mind to replace the dry plate altogether.

Now, of course, he needs a company with revenue streams to do that.

So he’ll be in the dry plate business for, you know, a good time moving forward, which is why he had to work so hard to save it.

He obviously needs that business, that’s where the world’s at right now.

Speaker 2: Right, but that’s who’s going to pay for his other ideas and developments.

Speaker 1: Exactly.

I mean, this is what the business is, you know, you have the very exclusive group of wet plate people, the also exclusive and slightly expanding group of dry plate people that he can sell to.

And what he’s trying to do is move beyond the whole thing.

So now that we are caught up on how George Eastman gets firmly planted in the photography business at the time of dry plates and is part of the process of popularizing the product with his Eastman Dry Plate Company, we can turn the corner to the next phase of our journey, which is of course how George Eastman and company make photography really easy, really cheap, and for absolutely everyone.

And to do that, we will look at some of the pieces of the puzzle that get us to that seminal product, the Brownie.

And those pieces of course start out with the two simple components that we’ve been talking about the whole time.

You have your camera, the box, and your image capturing material on the back wall of the box.

First, the light-sensitive product that goes in the back of the camera, we’re going to talk about the progression.

It starts out as paper-backed film, then he also has a product called a roll holder that we’ll talk about, and third, the true game changer, transparent film.

Then with these products in hand, George will move on to the next step, jumping into the process of making really cheap, affordable, easy-to-use cameras that will become the predecessors to our Brownie.

And to be clear, again, there’s overlap in the creation of these things.

It’s just I always think it’s a little bit easier to, you know, break them down into pieces so you can kind of follow them along from beginning to end and I’ll note the overlap here and there.

But obviously, you know, everything’s not happening in a vacuum one piece at a time.

But let’s start off by jumping into the creation of film.

So we start with paper-backed film and, you know, we know why George is looking for something better than the plates.

He and everybody else had issues with plates and wet plates are just a mess.

That’s never going to be a product for everybody, right?

Speaker 2: Okay, yeah.

Speaker 1: But not only is it the process and the issues with the emulsion that he has to keep fighting with, it’s also the fact that I mean they’re glass.

Like they’re big glass plates.

You know what I mean? This is there’s other ways to improve on this.

Carrying around big glass plates in your pack is not exactly a good way to go about things.

Speaker 2: They’re heavy and glass.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and quite frankly, they’re one at a time.

They’re a big piece of glass, then you take one picture and you have to use another one.

So I mean there are technically speaking people came up with other contraptions for ways to do things, but generally speaking, you know, that’s what we’re talking about.

And that’s not what George wants.

He doesn’t want heavy and inconvenient, he wants easy, compact, and quite frankly, a cheaper process to make them and develop the pictures resulting in what he will believe is mass appeal.

And you know, this isn’t hindsight where we’re like, “Hey, and then he made this and people caught…” No, like he’s actually trying to reach the masses.

That’s one of the things I find really interesting about this and that’s why I said before, you know, he’s creating this market.

So it’s not like he just invented it out of whole cloth and all of a sudden everybody’s using cameras.

We’ve been talking about this the whole time, right? But he’s the impetus for being like, “You know what? We’re going to make this a mass consumer product.” And we’ll see that he’ll even sacrifice quality for cheaper and easier if the quality is at least good enough, so to speak.

And that starts with the first step on his journey to a perfect, lighter than glass, easier, more convenient product for his negatives: paper-backed film.

And at this point, let’s reintroduce our old friend William Walker of Walker Pocket Camera fame back into our story because he’s actually been brought on to Eastman’s company.

And the reason for this is pretty simple.

Eastman was not yet into camera hardware production and sales, so he doesn’t have like a hardware aspect of his company.

And while Walker was apparently, as we said, not great with people, he would become an important if somewhat prickly employee at Eastman’s company.

We’re not going to go into all the details, but they don’t get along great.

Walker can be a little difficult and obviously Eastman is clearly pretty strong-headed or he wouldn’t get where he’s going to get to in his business.

Speaker 2: But he needs someone to build a camera.

Speaker 1: But in the beginning, he’s not going to build a camera, but he needs him to come on with like the technicalities of the process.

And we’ll see he gets assigned actually a very particular assignment.

So Walker has these technical skills that George needed, particularly if they’re going to replace plate photography with film photography.

This isn’t just some small transition because as we’ll see, you know, cameras aren’t ready for that.

However, what Eastman did not need was Walker’s general demeanor in his daily life.

Okay, so he basically splits himself and Walker up on projects.

So his plan is now to take over the world, you know, the overarching view here is let’s take over the world of negative production with a new product.

It’s going to be a two-phase plan: making the film and making a way to use it.

Eastman’s going to take charge of making the new film and Walker’s going to head up the roll holder creation part, which I mentioned earlier, which we’ll get to soon.

But just as a quick precursor, as I’ve alluded to, if you’re going to make a new type of negative, you can’t just jam it into a camera it doesn’t fit into.

All the cameras are made for plates, you’re going to need a way to put your film in there, hence the roll holder.

So they have to make a product to make that happen.

So Eastman’s going to make the roll film, Walker will make the device to put that film in the new cameras.

And like I said, we’re going to split these two up for simplicity.

So why film? Well, the concept of film has been around for a minute.

I mean, the benefits are what you would think: it’s lighter, you can just roll it up, and theoretically not have to worry about breaking it like glass, right?

Speaker 2: Okay, yeah.

Speaker 1: But no one has been able to make a successful working product.

So Eastman jumps into the fray to see if he can be the first.

He first tries to make it using a collodion coat on glass, then applying his emulsion, waiting for it to dry, and then removing it and using it like a film product, right? Does that make sense?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: But it’s never strong enough.

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 1: So what you’re trying to do is replace your glass plate negative with a thinner, easier to use, smaller, more convenient product.

Now, why do you want it to be transparent and not paper-backed? Did you do any actual development of pictures in your class, Julia, in college?

Speaker 2: Yes, I did.

Speaker 1: Okay, so do you remember how basically you develop a picture?

Speaker 2: Yeah, you’d put it in a little frame thing and then you’d project light through it onto the photo-sensitive paper.

Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.

And in the simplest terms, that’s what you do.

Just maybe round it out just a tiny little bit.

First of all, there’s a ton of videos of this on YouTube.

A lot of what people do now is actually add digital creation to the process, so that’s a little bit different, they kind of bypass some of this.

But in its simplest terms, you know, that’s exactly what you’re doing.

You have a little holder for your piece of film, which can be, you know, the film has varied sizes as we’ve gone through this.

So the size of it’s not super important.

You put it in this little holder and then you bring it up to a device that enlarges it in most cases, which almost looks like kind of a microscope contraption.

It has a tray on the bottom that you’re going to put your new light-sensitive paper on, and then up top you have this little thing where you put your slide into it.

So it’s almost like the slide is separated from the bottom of your microscope by a foot and it’s basically going to project the light down through your film onto that paper down there.

In essence, the way I look at it, it’s almost like you’re just taking another picture.

Like you’re taking a picture of a picture, right? Like you have your negative, you’re going to flash the light through it and it’s going to put your image on that paper on the bottom.

Speaker 2: And you have like little wheels and little things to like bring it in focus and you can size it up if you want to.

Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s there’s a lot more to it.

We’re just talking like super basic.

Like you’re in the super basic sense, you’re just going to shoot light through that negative, put that image down on the light-sensitive paper on the bottom, and then just to wrap up the idea in the simplest terms, there’s really nothing on your picture.

You take that paper that’s light-sensitive and you put it in a developer, it’s like another chemical, and then you put it in a stopper, and then you put it in a fixer, and then it’s a picture.

And then you hang it up and you dry it.

But in its simplest terms, like I said, it’s that’s really what you’re doing is you’re just kind of shining light through your negative so it shines down through to another sheet of light-sensitive photo paper and that will end up being your image, right?

Speaker 2: Right.

So whatever is black in the negative becomes white in the picture.

Speaker 1: Right.

And in all the while, obviously, you’re doing all of this without light.

You’re using red lights, that’s why they’re called dark lights and dark rooms, because that way you’re not ruining any of this paper until you flip that light on for a second or however long you want to expose your sheet.

Does that all sound right and clear?

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: Okay.

So that’s your basic process.

So now I ask you again, why do you not want your film to have a paper backing?

Speaker 2: Well, because you want your light to go through it.

You have to get the paper off.

Speaker 1: You have to get the paper off.

You can’t you’re not going to be able to like all of these things, that’s why we’re using glass, that’s what, you know, you can’t use the paper, right? So you have to take the paper off.

So that’s why nobody wants to use it.

But the problem is there’s no material strong enough to not have paper on it.

So as just a step in the process, he’s going to go with this and kind of just kind of work on it on the fly.

Speaker 2: So basically you’d get it in the little holder and then remove the paper and then go through the steps?

Speaker 1: No, you have to do it first and I’ll explain that in a second.

It’s actually a whole process and it ends up being like a huge pain for Eastman.

So now that we’ve got caught up on why you want to do it, let’s look at Eastman’s actual paper.

So unlike any clear material at the time, the paper adds the needed strength.

At first, they actually put the light-sensitive emulsion right on the paper, but the problem with that is even after you take the paper off, the grain is still embedded in your emulsion, right? So, you know, I think of it this way, it’s like just for simplest terms, it’s like it’s film, right? You’re just working with film the whole time.

Just just pretend it’s film.

And there’s a piece of paper on it, you rip it off and now you have film.

And I just think that makes more sense to the modern sensibility.

But that’s the problem is when you rip it off, you’re going to leave that grain on your film and then it’s going to get developed into your picture.

So Eastman invents a better paper film or what he calls American Film, which is a slightly complicated process.

But as the Kodak Company describes it on their website, Eastman’s solution was to coat the paper with a layer of plain soluble gelatin and then with a layer of insoluble light-sensitive gelatin.

After exposure and development, the gelatin bearing the image was stripped from the paper, transferred to a sheet of clear gelatin, and varnished with collodion and cellulose solution that forms a tough flexible film.

So the way I understand it, right, like you’re basically taking the picture with a layer that you can dissolve so then you can get the paper apart.

Speaker 2: Right.

You have the paper, you have the layer that you can dissolve, and then you have the photo-sensitive stuff.

Speaker 1: Right.

And in the end, you kind of have film, but you have to go through this whole process in the meantime, which is super annoying.

Which we’ll discuss in a second.

So now that you have this new film process and it does work, you know, this paper film, who can you sell it to?

Speaker 2: No one because no one has a camera that uses it.

Speaker 1: There’s no one you can sell this to.

So that’s where we come in with our other part of the story and enter Mr.

Walker and his part of the project.

Speaker 2: And his attitude, apparently.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and his attitude.

He is a little bit of a… this is why Walker is on the roll holder hunt to come up with a way to use this film and insert it into another camera.

And he’s able to do this with amazing success.

I mean, he does it, he nails it.

This is in the early going at the very least, this is an awesome idea bringing this guy in.

Or as the Eastman Museum put it, on May 5, 1885, the patent for the Eastman-Walker roll holder was granted.

The device was created to allow photographers to advance multiple exposures of roll film through a camera instead of handling single shot plates.

I mean, that is pretty awesome.

Speaker 2: That’s a big deal.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and I have a picture of it here.

And it is, I mean, you know, it’s what you think it would be, right? Like you basically instead of putting this big plate in the back of your camera, you now have this little box that you can weave film through, kind of like a regular cartridge of film, except this fits into the camera, so you’re replacing it in other people’s products.

And I mean that’s pretty awesome, right? Like you basically take this roll holder with your film in it, your Eastman paper-backed film, and then you can put it into your dry plate camera.

So you don’t have to make you don’t have to buy another camera.

Speaker 2: Oh, okay.

So you’re retrofitting an old dry plate camera with this roller thing.

Speaker 1: Well basically yeah, you don’t have to do anything to your camera.

That’s the whole point.

That’s why it’s so brilliant.

You just take this and put it in the back instead of using your plate.

And what’s even better is you can then just advance to the next picture.

It’s not like a plate where you can only use one at a time.

This actually has the film rolling through these rollers in this plate replacement that you can just spin the side, take another picture, spin, take another picture.

Do you see what I’m saying? So it’s actually even better.

So one, it helps you use this product that they’re trying to push on everybody, but two, I mean it’s actually allowing you to take multiple pictures.

So again, there were ways to do that in the past, but this is the first like really feasible consumer-friendly way to do that.

And it worked great.

I mean, you could take Eastman’s new film, put it on the roll holder, and put it in your camera with the compatible plate size and take a bunch of pictures without having to change plates.

They took their new product around the world to international exhibitions and they won awards.

People loved it.

In fact, it’s such a success and he would have such effective patents that it would actually become difficult for other companies to make film systems for their own products.

Speaker 2: Oh wow, because he patented the roller.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and he like got in on the market first and he’s got the film and he it’s he’s actually blocking people out of making stuff for their own cameras.

Um, so again, in the beginning I said it’s a long run of him being super worried about all these intellectual properties and very effectively controlling them for his company.

Also, this is where you can see how big the focus of film was going to be for the Eastman and in the future Kodak Company because having patented his first ever practical film and soon after creating the roll holder, he actually changes the name of the company to the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company in December 1884, still of course in Rochester.

A couple side notes here that I think are interesting to note.

With the name change, the company incorporated and actually started selling stock, so he has a bit of an influx of cash.

Uh, strong Eastman and Walker take the largest shares, so they’re still like the main characters in this company.

Um, and it also shows how important they are and how far along we are in the process because now they’re just a little bit of a bigger organization.

Second, interesting to note, the device, if you remember,

Speaker 1: When Walker made his device, he was making it with interchangeable parts.

Obviously, this one’s going to work the same way.

Not obviously, but he makes this one work the same way.

So again, you know, we’re still before the mass production techniques of people that we think of doing these things in the future with cars.

And we get a 32-year-old Eastman.

He’s prepping for mass production by 1885.

And of course, he starts sending salespeople over the world to hawk these new products.

But I mean, I think that’s kind of interesting to note.

Again, it seems for some reason all these other people get credit for things that maybe this guy was kind of on the ground floor of, right? And another thing that they brought up in one of the books I read is he actually kind of gets credit for building the first business park.

Because in the future here, he’s going to start developing all this stuff and putting it in the same place at the Kodak campus.

And he’s kind of got everything going on.

He’s got production, he’s got development, he’s got like a technology department where they’re working on all the new technology.

And he kind of buys the whole area and builds it together so everybody can like kind of live nearby and have this like huge industrial complex to do all this stuff.

So again, he’s like a real game changer.

But again, we’re focused a little bit more on the product than we are on him.

But I just think it’s interesting to point that out.

Speaker 2: I do have a question, and maybe you’ll touch upon this later, but what happens to the film after the paper film? Who develops it? Like, do you send it to him and he develops it, or where do you go?

Speaker 1: Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Speaker 2: Where do you go with it?

Speaker 1: Wouldn’t that just be amazing if you could? Because where are we at right now in the history of the world? So where we’re at is, if you remember, Walker had his neat little camera and what did Walker sell you with his first camera? All the stuff you needed to do it.

So that’s great, but I still got to do it.

So let’s hold on a pin on that.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: So the first steps of the process on the way to the Brownie are completed.

The creation of the first successful roll film, the roll holder are complete, but a lot of people are still using plates, largely because of the higher quality that they can produce.

And obviously Eastman knows this.

But importantly, like we said, his goal is not actually to win at quality necessarily, which I think is kind of actually the lynchpin of this whole process.

I mean, he is literally prioritizing mass appeal over pretty much anything else.

And it is a calculated assessment.

So in 1885, while Eastman is around the world touting the greatness of his paper negatives, his new film, parenthetically, which he never wanted to make in the first place, he knows the challenge is still largely to get people off of plates.

See, the issue is people in photography are still largely amateurs.

And by amateur, we don’t mean people that don’t know what they’re doing.

Speaker 2: Well, they’re still, in my mind, they’re still professional, but they’re just this random guy that woke up one day and said, “Hey, I’m going to go buy this stuff and become a photographer and open a studio.” So is that what that means in that way he’s an amateur? Like, he didn’t go get trained to use this, he’s just kind of figuring this out by himself.

Speaker 1: Well, the thing is there isn’t a ton of training going on.

There’s nowhere really to train.

But that’s more on the line of what you would think.

But the problem here is like what things meant back then as opposed to what they mean now, right? Because when you’re talking about amateurs back then, they’re saying like that this person’s actually involved in this and they’re really into it.

They’re not saying like, “Hey, this guy just fell off the truck and had a camera and took two pictures and moved on.” There is no hobbyist.

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 1: Okay, like there’s no “I just want to take a picture.” That’s the whole point of this.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: That doesn’t exist.

So when you say amateur, it’s relative to what we’re talking about, people actually making money and doing it for a profession.

But it doesn’t mean they’re just completely, you know, lost in the process, right? It’s not like they’re just, you know, doing it for fun or whatever.

You have to make that commitment.

That’s what I was talking about in this and the last episode.

Like, you were making a commitment.

Now with the dry plates, this gets even more complex because now it is starting to get a little bit easier that you can kind of get that accessibility.

So it kind of just varies depending on what context you’re in.

But here what we’re saying is like these people are dedicated to the craft and they were actually into it in some capacity.

So between the professionals and the majority of people being that slightly lower tier who are still really dedicated, still using plate systems, and quite frankly, large cumbersome plate systems still make the best pictures.

Apparently the larger the size, it also helped with the quality of the picture.

If you think about it, you’re not doing as much enlarging and all that kind of thing.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: You’re really into something, you’re going to take time and effort, you’re going to go for the quality, right? Like you’re going to go for that quality.

And that’s kind of the problem.

The market doesn’t exist.

But that’s what dawns on Eastman.

This is not his market anymore.

And this is like the genius of this.

This is like what he really does.

He’s still making dry plates for these people.

He’s still making his plates.

But along with this film, he wants the sales, he needs the business, but he realizes this is not the future.

Speaker 2: He’s going to try and target everyday people.

Speaker 1: This is the entire story in a nutshell of how he makes the world he makes.

The quote from Eastman on Kodak’s site reads, “When we started out with our scheme of film photography, we expected that everybody who used glass plates would take up film.

But we found that the number that did so was relatively small.

And in order to make a large business, we would have to reach the general public.” Or as Brayer puts it, she sums it up in her book, he soon realizes that the number of photographers in both these categories that the economy could support was finite, and in his mind took a turn that changed the history of the craft.

The general public would demand simplicity of operation over photographic quality.

Speaker 2: That makes sense, yeah.

Speaker 1: So while presenting the roll holder and paper-back film to the world as great advances, which he did, he’s in the newspapers, he’s telling everybody how great this is, Eastman privately believed that they were makeshifts on the way to a simple universal system.

So he’s telling everybody, he’s touting the wonders of this, and he doesn’t even want to be making it.

The roll holder was an accessory.

The key would be a simple camera designed to exploit a roll of flexible transparent film.

Those were Brayer’s words at the end there also.

I mean, to me, this really is the whole story in a nutshell.

From here on, his goal is specifically to create mass appeal.

A camera and film in everyone’s hands.

And his way to do that is simplicity.

That’s the goal.

Super easy, super cheap, super simple, everyone can be a user.

I mean, it is just amazing to me.

Has anyone in history ever been so successful at achieving a planned goal of this magnitude? I mean, I was trying to think about it.

It’s like you have people go, “Hey, yeah, you know, we need steel.

I’m going to make all this steel.” We have this, but this guy, I swear, it’s just a little different, right? Like he’s like, “No, I’m making this market and then I’m flooding it.” And I just think it’s really kind of amazing because man, he just hits a home run like you can’t believe, right?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: So you have the beginning of your film and your roll holder.

Now it’s time to get your simple camera and flexible roll of transparent film.

So onto the next step in setting the foundation for the Brownie: transparent film.

So why is transparent film the answer? As we alluded to earlier, there’s some issues.

Paper-back film isn’t great.

He never wanted to make it in the first place.

The pros still prefer the glass.

Also, it had the paper.

So like we talked about, you still have the shenanigans of having to remove it when you’re developing it.

And you asked me what do you do with this film? Well, here’s the thing.

This added expense is now getting placed back directly on Eastman because by 1886, Eastman has created a printing and enlarging service and he is the one dealing with the paper because now he is offering film development as part of his business.

Speaker 2: Right, well someone has to and he’s the one that made it.

Speaker 1: But that’s the thing.

People were doing their own film.

This is him making it for everyone to be able to take pictures.

Because everything is always like, “Hey, this is easier, this is easier,” and then you just have to do all this stuff that is like super not easy.

So what he’s trying to do is get to that point where it is all easy.

So he’s actually developing the film and making it this huge commercial business.

Not to say that there aren’t other people as well, but he’s just pulling that aspect into his business as well.

In fact, even with an automatic electrified printing system printing over 5,000 prints a day, his business could not keep up with orders.

And he certainly doesn’t want less orders.

Instead, he wants a faster process.

So I mean, he’s really trying to capture the entire market.

Film, in a moment we’ll talk about the cameras, development, he’s making your pictures, he wants to do it all.

But anyway, for all of those reasons, including just the direct cost of that he now has to deal with, transparent film is the goal, come hell or high water.

So how is he going to make this film so we can start making his camera for it and get us to that Brownie? Well, the story of transparent film is a tale to be told.

There is invention, there’s flammable product, there’s backstabbing, there’s revenge, there’s an everyman coming through in the clutch and making it big, and there is an amazing finale where a dead guy gets $5 million from Eastman.

Speaker 2: I want to see this in a movie.

That sounds like a tagline for a movie.

Speaker 1: This is all, this is a movie.

But it all ends with the foundation for camera development for the next century: transparent film.

In short, this transparent film is going to be huge.

So for some perspective at the start here, the importance of this, it really can’t be overstated.

So I actually just stole a line from a gentleman named Todd Gustafson in his book, and I’m going to now give him credit for it and read the actual quote.

He says, “Roll film became a foundation for camera development for the next century.

In essence, a blueprint had been agreed upon and from this point forward, advances in camera technology would take place at a rapid rate.

As with most technological advances, this one did not happen overnight.

After the debut of roll film, dry plates did not simply disappear.” So that’s the context of what we’re talking about here.

The future is on the way.

This is the future.

Just think about this.

I mean, it’s not hard to wrap your mind around, right? Like a roll of film with a ton of pictures on it that you can just load into your camera and then stash it away in a small container to be developed later.

This is the whole thing, right? Like what else? You can see why Eastman is obsessed with this.

We talked about all the great things you could do with cameras like documenting war, capturing images from athletic competitions, anything you can think of.

Well, clearly if it’s not a big glass plate that you’re taking this picture on and you can take 10 of them at a time, this is going to just amp everything up.

So it’s a huge step.

So let’s start off in my little tale with the invention.

Now again, Eastman’s not the only one working on this.

He’s just the one who’s going to make it all come together.

The first step is in 1869 when John Hyatt invented the first popular form of celluloid.

Amazingly, he was actually looking for a substitute material to make billiard balls out of, which I think is kind of amazing.

That was in the National Inventors Hall of Fame they were talking about that.

But what he comes up with is nothing less than the first ever synthetic plastic material.

He even made the machinery that was needed to work on this new material.

It actually ends up being used for dentures as well.

There’s a lot of interesting things about this.

I feel like this is almost like its own story.

But to get to the point, this guy invented artificial plastic.

Okay, so we needed that to happen.

Speaker 2: So this is in 1869.

Speaker 1: Right.

As for photographic application of this, Hyatt’s product was made into blocks that could be cut up.

Some companies were actually trying to make a new dry plate out of this material, see if they could improve on that product.

It never really pans out.

But in 1882, John Stevens, who was working in the new celluloid industry, discovers that you could dilute the celluloid and then make it into a clear flexible film.

Now, this product is once again flammable.

Speaker 2: I was going to say, I thought like old-timey film was super flammable.

Speaker 1: Yeah, so we kind of like, that’s what I was talking about.

There’s a few when I said that it sparks a bit of issues in the intro of this is what I was referring to.

So we do have a bit of a safety issue popping up again in the sense that you have to be careful or you’re going to have issues.

But again, it’s not toxic or anything like that where, you know, you have to be using toxic stuff.

Now, unfortunately, even this flexible celluloid couldn’t just be rolled up and thrown into a camera or obviously the issue would be over.

These thinner flexible celluloid sheets are still too thick to get into a roll holder.

So Eastman is going to have to improve on it farther.

And this is what Eastman and other companies are working on at this point.

So by 1886, Eastman’s strategy to do this is to put one of his brightest people on it.

Again, always getting the best stuff, always trying to get the best people.

And like I said, he had a bunch of them.

So he was known for hiring the smartest people out of college he could find and also just the smartest people who learned on the job.

And we’re going to get both in this.

It’s like I said, you know, he never, he’s never trying to cash out.

He’s never just taking the money.

He’s always reinvesting it.

So the man he has here to put on this task is Henry Reichenbach, who Eastman had previously hired right out of Rochester University to work on improving his paper-back film.

Now he’s going to move to the real goal: the transparent film.

And after three years, run the montage of all this great chemistry happening in a lab and a guy with his beakers…

Speaker 2: And then he’s got those glasses on, the safety glasses, the big goggles.

Speaker 1: Yeah, all these exciting chemistry stories that I’m not the guy to tell.

Speaker 2: Little wheels spinning and little Bunsen burners.

Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.

Beakers overflowing.

He actually comes up with a working formula.

This is a bunch of chemistry again, but in short, just to be complete, the solution of nitrocellulose and camphor in methanol, strengthened celluloid so it could be made into thinner film.

Basically, it’s a concoction to make this celluloid stronger so you can make it thinner.

And it’s still strong enough.

But basically, you coated your work area with that solution he came up with, then it dried, you coated it with your light-sensitive material, that dried, you cut it up, you got film, goes into the roll holder, you can pop it into your camera.

Again, whole time keep all this stuff out of the light because it’s all sensitive.

Speaker 2: Right.

This is also a callback to our Fordite episode, nitrocellulose I believe.

Speaker 1: Yeah, these things pop up again and again.

It’s kind of amazing.

It’s always like the same people, they pop their head up here and there.

But yeah, I did think about that.

But this is the product, okay? On February 23, 1889, Eastman presents samples to his company’s board.

Then he rented a building from Strong to start making it right away.

So production begins, product goes on the market August 1889.

Eastman proclaims, “The new film is the slickest product that we have ever tried to make and its method of manufacture will eliminate all of the defects hitherto experienced in film manufacture.

The field for it is immense.

If we can fully control it, I would not trade it for the telephone.

There is more millions in it than anything else because the patents are young and the field won’t require eight to ten years to develop it and introduce it.”

Speaker 2: Oh, so he’s really like, “I got control of this.”

Speaker 1: We’ll see about this.

Anyway, the reception is off the charts.

Could barely keep up with demand.

He built a factory at Britain to fulfill that market.

He’s expanded all over the place.

Again, there’s too many paths for this story, I can’t hit them all.

Magazines are all reporting on how great it is.

Now, it would have been great if it was that easy.

It does take years to perfect.

And those are tumultuous years because remember, we have more pieces to this story.

We barely even got through…

Speaker 2: Someone’s gotta get backstabbed.

Yeah, there’s backstabbing.

Speaker 1: So for one reason or another, the film is always not working.

Basically, the chemists more or less are guessing and using trial and error again.

Remember, you know, I said it took decades to figure out that sulfur issue.

Those decades have not gone by yet.

We are still back in that time period.

No one really understands chemistry involved.

And because everything is so sensitive, the smallest thing can just ruin anything.

So one day the film wouldn’t work and the next day it would.

I mean, they would literally fix a problem by adding something and then fix the same problem soon after just by taking it out.

It is seemingly so haphazard that Eastman actually jokes they would be better off starting a prayer department to fix their issues.

Like he’s like, “This, we, he, it’s this, this much of a mess, right?”

Speaker 2: Bring me the priest.

Speaker 1: Yeah, he’s so, so things get so bad.

So many products are getting returned again.

There’s actually sentiment that roll film’s going to go away.

In fact, there are only two companies in the business.

And even Eastman still has to make his dry plates to stay afloat.

So now for the backstabbing and the revenge.

Along the way, in 1892, Eastman had fired his beloved Reichenbach because he found out that Reichenbach was in plans with co-conspirators to leave the company and start his own company, which he does and he goes off and that’s like a whole other tale.

But Eastman has to fire him.

Speaker 2: Oh no!

Speaker 1: But before Reichenbach lets the door hit him on the way out, he approved 40,000 feet of bad film for distribution and spoiled 1,400 gallons of emulsion, costing Eastman $50,000 in damage when he’s already out of money.

Speaker 2: Oh no!

Speaker 1: And what’s worse, now Eastman doesn’t have his Mr.

Fix-it.

Speaker 2: That’s espionage.

Speaker 1: Yeah, but he doesn’t have his guy anymore.

So now the company is just in turmoil.

He’s got this guy kicking over all his stuff while he’s leaving.

So here we are in the 1890s, like 15 years after he started this in his mom’s basement, and he’s once again on the verge of bankruptcy.

I mean, this is just a journey of dedication, right? Like this is just nonstop.

This is also like a really big problem when your plan is to get new and inexperienced people into buying your product, right? Like how many times do you try a company and their product stinks and then you’re like, “Oh, I’ll just try it again.” You know, I mean, this is not, remember nobody’s using this stuff.

He’s trying to create this industry and the last thing he needs is these finicky products.

So after a poor aid of chemists and despite many of his employees now coming from places like MIT, we get our everyman.

Eastman hires a young man with no university experience, 30-year-old William Stuber, who only made it through grammar school, to be the head chemist to the obvious shock of, you know, people in the company, right?

Speaker 2: Oh wow.

Speaker 1: And here we see Eastman make it clear the plan for mass appeal remains the same.

He tells Stuber, “It is okay to sacrifice quality in favor of consistency and ease because that’s the goal.”

Speaker 2: Good for Stuber.

Speaker 1: And Stuber is able to get things back on track.

He’s able to do it, you know what I mean? He figures it out.

He apparently knew kind of what was going on from his position in the company and when Eastman hired him, he’s like, “What’s going on with this?” and he’s like, “Oh, it’s your emulsion.” He’s like, “How do you even know this? You just got here like two minutes ago.” Anyway, so this guy’s just one of those types of people.

But now even then, after he fixes it, the prevailing thought remains the same.

The whole process is more of an art than a science.

And and things are not going to just change overnight, right? It’s not going to change for years for that until it becomes more scientific.

There once again, things are up and running, which is all that matters for now.

And this is the game changer.

This is the basic transparent negative that is used for the rest of time, okay? No stripping paper or these special treatments.

It’s just a roll of film you can plop in your camera.

Now and of course by the rest of time, I mean the basic premise, right?

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 1: We have different plastics now.

Speaker 2: Right, it’s not going to catch on fire.

Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s all these other things.

Yeah, they come up with a safety film.

That’s a big part of the story too.

Again, I didn’t really dive into that, but that’s a thing where they had to come up with safety film to get rid of that, you know, pesky flammability issue.

And frankly, it’s really just a matter of time because at this point, everything’s on its way to working out and film is going to be perfected.

But you have your product of the future now.

Or as Gustafson put it, your foundation for camera development for the next century.

Now, if you remember back to the original story, I do have one little piece to mention.

Remember when I said there’s a guy, dead guy, $5 million?

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Eastman’s company is not credited with inventing transparent flexible film.

Rather, a preacher named Hannibal Goodwin, who was looking for a better material for his slides of the Holy Land and filed a patent in 1887 that was so vague it wasn’t approved.

But for some reason, the courts let him keep resubmitting it for a decade, was eventually deemed by a federal court in 1914, long after Goodwin died, to have first invented roll film and Eastman eventually has to pay $5 million to settle the case and use the product.

Speaker 2: That’s a pretty good size step there.

Speaker 1: There you have it.

Okay, so the foundations for camera development for the next century.

Eastman and his top-notch employees came through.

We got our film, we got our roll holder, which we have while we need it.

We’re up and running.

Now all we need to get to that Brownie is a camera business to build the foundations for it.

So let’s see Eastman’s camera business.

How has it been coming along up to this point? So what’s the camera landscape? You remember how cumbersome wet plate cameras were, large devices that you had to carry around with your wagon and all that.

Speaker 2: Right, the one that was an accordion.

Speaker 1: Right, exactly.

And then you get the dry plates, you can get rid of some of it and people start making more cameras as part of it.

So, you know, the development started to pick up a little bit.

We even reviewed William Walker’s pocket camera, which, side note, if you ever look at it, I mean this isn’t going to fit in any of my pockets, but… but you could hold it in your hands, you know what I mean? Like if we look at a picture of it, one thing I can’t get is the dimensions on a lot of these things, but there’s usually a comparison.

So, you know, you can hold this in two hands.

 tripod and caravan, let’s put it that way.

Well, what Eastman wants to do is take that further.

He wants to make the process a simple click of a button.

Remember, the goal here is to appeal to novices now.

It’s almost like he’s already trying to lay the foundations for Instagram in the late 1800s.

I mean, he can see it coming.

He’s like, “This is the world I’m going to make it.” Well, his first attempt was something called the Detective Camera.

And honestly, other than to say that he never really produced this camera, we’re actually going to just skip over that for now, because Detective Cameras are really deserving of their own pod, their own story, their own show, which we may get to next.

We may do it after the Carp pod, I don’t know.

This isn’t iHeartRadio, we don’t have producers.

Nobody knows, who’s to say? Anyway, maybe we’ll bundle it with the Carp episode, I don’t know.

Anyway, that means we’re going to start with the Kodak.

See, Kodak, as I said originally, the name of a camera, not the company.

So let’s step back to 1888 and see how Eastman’s camera has been coming along alongside his film.

The Kodak is his first successful camera, which was designed for his company by a man named Frank Brownell.

Speaker 2: I always thought that Kodak was another person.

Speaker 1: No, that’s weird because it’s Eastman Kodak, you would think that, right? No, we’ll find out where that comes from, but it’s just Eastman, which also probably diluted some of his greatness, there’s so many reasons for it.

But like I said, the Kodak’s the first successful camera he makes.

So first of all, if you look at it, it’s a simple box with a lens in the front of it and you can hold it in your hands.

I mean, it really couldn’t be much more simple.

I mean, it’s just a cardboard box for a structure.

And because it’s 1888, when it was introduced, it was designed for paper-backed film because we’re still a year away from transparent film.

But that was soon changed with the first update named the Kodak No. 1.

All these things get numbers moving forward.

The camera actually came pre-loaded with film capable of taking 100 2.5-inch pictures.

Speaker 2: Oh, that’s pretty awesome, right?

Speaker 1: That is pretty awesome.

As far as cost, we’re still not there yet, okay? This baby’s going to set you back $25.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: Which is like, you know, over 800 bucks in today’s money.

So it’s a little expensive.

But I mean, you might save up for that if you were really into photography.

Again, that’s the problem.

It’s not for people who are really into photography.

There’s better products for that.

This is the never-ending march towards the actual product we’re trying to get to.

And we’re looking at getting people into photography in the first place.

So while it’s good and it is successful, it’s not exactly where we’re trying to be.

Speaker 2: I was going to say, I’m sure there’s some socialites in New York that had these cameras walking around the city taking pictures.

Speaker 1: Oh yeah, but the thing is, there’s a ton of camera companies.

There’s still actually other good cameras to buy.

So this is just Eastman’s part of it.

So there’s all kinds of cameras all over the place.

I mean, there’s tons and tons of different people making cameras for different products because you still had those people using the wet plates and everything else.

So Eastman actually branded this as one of the first point-and-shoot cameras because it was so easy to use.

Since the film was already in the camera, all you had to do was actually, you know what I mean, that’s what you have to do is point and shoot.

That’s the whole point.

And then there’s a little key in the top of the box that you could use to advance to the next spot in the film, take your next picture.

More importantly, the film went right into the camera, loaded on spools, no more roll holder, making it the first camera actually designed to accept film.

But wait, you might be saying, “Great, I can take pictures.

What am I going to do? I’m not a chemist.

How am I going to develop these pictures?” You actually said this.

You were like, “What am I going to do with it? I’m going to take this film out and I’m going to take it into a darkroom? I don’t have to print them off? Like, what am I going to do here?”

Speaker 2: Well, I can’t because I don’t know what I’m doing.

Speaker 1: Don’t worry, it came with instructions telling you how to do it.

Speaker 2: Oh.

Speaker 1: No, I’m just kidding.

It did, but you don’t actually need that.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: This is the thing that is just ingenious.

This comes out at the same time, this is just like a global takeover.

With the promotion of the camera, Eastman’s slogan for his advertisements for the Kodak was “You press the button, we do the rest.” And he meant it.

You actually buy your pre-loaded camera, take your pictures, and then just send the whole thing back.

Speaker 2: I thought that’s what we were going to end up…

Speaker 1: And he would take out the film, develop the pictures, reload the film, and send it back to you with your pictures printed off.

I mean, how amazing is that?

Speaker 2: That is pretty amazing.

That’s the first disposable but yet reusable camera.

Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s not… no, you just keep using it.

He just fills it back up.

It’s like… but I mean, you really don’t need to know anything about photography now to use this camera with this new marketing system.

And the process for that was 10 bucks.

So again, it’s a lot, but it’s pretty amazing, right? Like, he’s got all angles covered here.

And you can see how the number of people who can afford this is steadily rising.

So while we’re not where we want to be, we’re getting more people.

So what about the ease? I mean, you want easy, this is it.

One of his ads for the camera actually read that it’s loaded with transparent film, shows a picture of the camera being held by two hands to give the dimensions, it’s really no larger than like holding a half a loaf of bread or something like that, right? And it says, quote, “The Kodak can be carried on your bicycle without inconvenience and is always ready for instant use. 50 to 100 views can be taken in succession.

No previous experience necessary.” I bet you didn’t know old-timey radio guy was going to show up.

Speaker 2: I did not.

That was a pleasant surprise.

Speaker 1: Now, in reality, it had a lens apparatus that had holes in it, so you just take a picture and then all you had to do was pull a string to cock the shutter and then just press a button and the film was exposed with your image.

Then you turned a crank to be ready to move to the next film.

But it’s really close to just pushing a button, right? Like, I mean, it’s pretty simple.

But it’s a pretty neat contraption he came up with there.

But that’s, I mean, it’s a huge jump in the scheme to make it all about ease, right? And clearly, anyone can use this.

As Eastman put it, it could be, quote, “put into an ordinary man’s hands with satisfactory results.” Again, satisfactory results.

Speaker 2: Right.

He’s not even saying that like we’re going to make the best pictures ever.

Speaker 1: No, because quite frankly, if you want to do that, you know…

Speaker 2: Hire a photographer.

Speaker 1: Or pony up the money and go spend the two years it’s going to take you to learn how to do it, right? Like, this is not his thing.

So, and this Kodak is a hit.

It won awards, it was the talk of the industry, and in the first six months, it drew a profit of $269,000.

Speaker 2: And that’s in old-timey money?

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Oh wow.

Speaker 1: President Cleveland had one.

Supposedly, the Dalai Lama had one and grabbed it before he had to flee his palace in Tibet in 1904.

Speaker 2: Well, yeah, because it wasn’t developed yet.

Speaker 1: Yeah, he had to take his pictures.

But there’s actually a song called “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest.” Gilbert and Sullivan used the phrase referencing Kodak and “you press the button, we do the rest” in an operetta called Utopia.

Speaker 2: That’s wow.

Speaker 1: People began taking photos of their children for the first time.

They began recording the passing of time.

The phrase “Kodak” became used for everything by people trying to cash in on the fad.

So let’s take a minute to just look at the overall importance of this camera, because I said I keep pinning everything on the Brownie, but the reality of it is, you know, this is an important step.

Like we said, it’s super easy to use and it’s super popular.

And it’s credited as creating true amateur photography.

So not all the confusion with the words anymore, now we’re talking about people who are really just newbies to the process.

But more than that, it also makes Kodak the first international finishing industry.

I mean, we’re not really going into Kodak as a business overall here, but this means not only are they making film, they’re now making cameras and they are a worldwide development company of pictures.

And more subtly, it links the name Kodak to hobby photography and creates an army of “Kodakers,” as they come to be known, which end up being a menace on society.

And of course, the name of the company is soon changed to Eastman Kodak Company in 1892 to reflect all of that.

Speaker 2: So where does the name Kodak come from?

Speaker 1: The name Kodak for the Kodakers?

Speaker 2: Yes.

Or for the company.

Speaker 1: For the camera.

Yeah, there’s like a bunch of different stories on that, okay? So like, some of them actually don’t even credit him with doing it.

They say like somebody else came up with it and he just took it.

There is actually reason to believe that he made it, in my opinion, okay? Like he gave a bunch of reasons, like he likes the letter K.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: Because he said it was strong and incisive.

Speaker 2: I agree with that.

Speaker 1: Yeah, he said he, yeah, exactly.

He wanted something that he could pronounce in multiple languages, which to me sounds like him.

He’s like, I guess, you know, you won’t be interpreting the… what I took it to mean is like you’re not going to pronounce it differently, right? Right.

It’s a new word.

Speaker 2: Well, and it’s very… it’s read phonetically, which applies to many languages, like you said.

Speaker 1: Right.

But also, he actually wrote in his British patent application that it does not resemble anything in the art and cannot be associated with anything in the art except Kodak.

And that totally sounds like him.

Like, you know what I mean? Like that obsession he has with how I’m going to just have control of all this stuff.

That sounds like probably the main impetus for naming it that.

He actually also said in an interview, there’s a commercial value in having a peculiar name, you know, it can’t be imitated or counterfeited and it’s not pretty.

He didn’t actually really like the name, but he said it protected the advertising.

Speaker 2: Well, it makes me think of Kodiak, you know, in Alaska.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there was actually a camera called that, but I’m not positive.

But I mean, I think it says a lot about who he is and I think it also, you know, indicates that that’s what the product comes from is who he is, because he’s just involved in everything, the planning, the detail, and he’s just doing it all really, really well.

And this camera just embodies everything he’s trying to achieve, the monopoly-like control of the industry, the broad appeal.

The Kodak No. 1 iteration, the second one like I said after they modified it, actually had 10,000 made.

The ease of use is amazing.

It’s almost cheap because there’s actually soon a $6 version, which brings it down again, expanding the market.

But for the real finale on that part of it, we have to turn to our Brownie camera and see how cheap easy picture taking is truly unleashed on the masses.

Speaker 2: Are we there? Are we there now?

Speaker 1: We are at the Brownie camera.

Speaker 2: Yay! The build-up.

There was…

I almost said murder, but there wasn’t murder.

There was backstabbing.

There was just a dead guy that got five million dollars.

Speaker 1: Exactly.

But so, why is the Brownie so important, at least to me? Well, it’s important to me because I watched about it on video like 20 years ago and it’s been rolling around in my brain ever since.

But why is it important globally? Let’s tackle these points.

We’ll look at the camera itself, we’ll see how it defined really cheap, super easy to use, and was a camera for almost literally everyone.

And perhaps even more important for globalizing use and spreading this product, how Eastman’s Kodak branding and advertising made everyone know that those things were true and made them want one, launching a world of snapshots in everyone’s hands.

First, the camera itself.

There were, of course, other people trying to make simple, easy-to-use cameras, right? Just as everything else in this story.

They were wanting cheap cameras that people could afford.

But Eastman’s the one who pulled it off in a big, big way.

So how did he do it? First of all, I said one of the defining characteristics of Eastman was that he hired all the best people he could and he gave them what they needed, right? Well, Eastman once again turns to Brownell.

In fact, he would eventually even build a six-story camera manufacturing building to rent to Brownell to make cameras for him after Eastman bought Brownell’s equipment to then fill the building back up.

Speaker 2: Wait, what?

Speaker 1: So yeah, he wanted this guy so bad, he builds a building for him, then he buys all his stuff off of him, then he puts it in the building and he rents it back to him so the guy has like guaranteed money, you know what I’m saying? So Brownell actually made the camera for Eastman, all of the cameras between 1885 and 1902, but he also makes this one.

And that included like 60 different models.

Eastman called him the greatest camera designer that ever lived.

So Brownell is really, really the guy for this and he does not disappoint.

The Brownie itself is once again like the Kodak, a box camera.

I actually have a Brownie 2A here that I purchased recently.

I can tell you that it’s six and a quarter inches long, it’s five inches high, and it’s three and a quarter inches wide.

They look pretty similar and so I think that’s a pretty decent rough dimensions for the original.

I wasn’t able to procure one of those, okay? So the 2A model I have started in 1907 and the version I have is from 1920 to 1924, it’s the most it can be narrowed down as far as I know.

And my version has a metal cage in it, so they held up a little bit better and that’s why you could actually still get your hands on one of those if you want them.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: But the original one, getting back to the story, is a leatherette-covered cardboard box with a wooden film carrier.

So basically a rectangular cardboard box, which like the last inch or so on the back was a lid you could pull off, exposing, you know, like a perfectly fit inner container.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: I think if you think of like a tissue box with one of those, you know, fancy covers on the top, like the ceramic thing.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: And you set that down on its side and made the top of the box the lens, like that’s kind of what we’re talking about here.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: So on top of that, there’s this little key on the top that looks like a winder for a jewelry box, which you use to advance the film to the next picture.

So the original didn’t even have a viewfinder.

They built a clip-on finder that you can get later on, but the original doesn’t have a viewfinder to like look through and line up your picture or anything like that.

Speaker 2: Oh.

So this really is point and shoot.

Speaker 1: Yes, it’s… you actually have to point it, yeah.

So this is pretty much the embodiment of how I described the camera to start off.

It’s a box with a hole in it to let the light in and hit the film on the back wall, right? Like that’s what we got here.

It was average by design, as Blair put it.

It was made to be average, right? Like that’s the goal.

Like everything about it’s going to be average: the user, the product, the finished result.

Speaker 2: Right.

I was going to say I wonder how many pictures were from like neck down.

Speaker 1: Yeah, right.

Because there’s no viewfinder.

It had a simple shutter mechanism behind the lens.

All you had to do to take a picture was push a lever on the side of the camera.

It’s like this little tiny metal lever, it’s pretty much the same thing on mine.

It couldn’t be much simpler, really.

I mean, it was introduced in February 1900 and produced until October 1901.

It took 117 size film and made pictures that were two and a quarter by two and a quarter inches square.

So the Kodak had actually made round pictures, these are actually square pictures.

Speaker 2: Oh, okay.

Speaker 1: So also a little bit of an improvement there.

It had a lens and a rotary shutter, very similar.

And all of this you got for one dollar.

Speaker 2: Oh.

Speaker 1: One dollar to buy this camera.

Which is why there aren’t any of them anymore, right? Like they obviously made these out of inexpensive materials on purpose.

You couple that with the mass production techniques, that’s what allows them to be sold for a dollar.

And that was the genius of Brownell putting this all together and also making the product that you could make for a dollar.

Like basically it was already apparent that the largest source of Kodak’s profit was going to be the film.

So they needed to get cameras in people’s hands and get them hooked on it.

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 1: And you could actually get a roll of film starting for 15 cents for a six-exposure roll, which you could again send back to Kodak for processing or take them to the lab.

So you could see why this is such a big deal, right?

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: It’s an easy-to-use functioning camera at just an absurd price point.

But that was only half of the battle, right? Now comes the scheme to get them in everyone’s hand, which starts with branding.

And in this case, branding meant a bunch of little rascals that were popularized by kids’ books.

They were, of course, called Brownies.

Speaker 2: Oh! I thought it would be from the guy’s name.

Speaker 1: From Brownell, ironically.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: The Brownie is not named after its designer, Frank Brownell, despite George’s appreciation for him.

But like I said, the goal here was to create a world of picture taking.

Or quite simply, to make your market share literally everyone.

And to do that, what better place to start than with the kids, right? Get them hooked early.

So Eastman brands the product for kids.

And to do that, he picked a name that was already popular with kids.

The name Brownie was taken from a group of characters from a popular kids’ book by Palmer Cox, who in turn had taken that from a bunch of characters from Scottish folklore called brownies.

And a fellow named Chuck Baker, really interesting website he maintains about the Brownie camera, and he actually has a write-up about them.

And his site’s actually pretty neat.

I mean, he has like pictures of all the cameras and like he has like manuals for the cameras.

He gives you like the basic info, like how much it cost, where it was.

It’s called brownie-camera.com.

It’s pretty neat if you want to check all them out.

But he also has a page showing original ads from the 1900s, which I always love.

Speaker 2: That sounds really neat.

Yeah, I love… love the original ads.

Speaker 1: As for the brownies, he has an article posted from the Ladies’ Home Journal in November 1892, where the author is answering the question “Where did brownies come from?” and she describes them like this: “They were all little men and appeared only at night to perform good and helpful deeds or enjoy harmless pranks while weary households slept.

Never allowing themselves to be seen by mortals, no person except those gifted with second sight could see the brownies.

But from the privileged few, principally old women, who were thus enabled to know and then catch a glimpse of their goblet guests, correct information regarding their size and color is said to have been gained.

They were called brownies on account of their color, which was said to be brown owing to their constant exposure to all kinds of weather, and also because they had brown hair, something which was not common in the country where the brownie was located.”

Speaker 2: Oh, that’s so cute.

Speaker 1: Little mischievous.

Speaker 2: Yeah, they’re cute little guys.

I have actually a book here I’m talking about in a second, we have some pictures of them.

Speaker 1: As far as the origins, she says there are too many stories to know the truth.

So those stories date back to the time of the Covenanters in Scotland, which is a religious political movement, but more importantly, it happened in the mid-1600s.

And she says they predate that.

But she says it was in a way like a part of a religion to many who would actually leave offerings of milk to the brownies, believing that good things would surely come to their homes if the brownies were remembered.

Interestingly, King James VI of Scotland wrote, I don’t know how you pronounce it originally, everybody calls it Daemonologie now, in 1597 about witchcraft, and in it, he actually references brownies, saying, quote, “the spirits called brownies appeared like a man and haunted divers’ houses without doing any evil.” So the origins of this folklore run really deep, right? But more recently, and more so what Eastman was referencing, are the Palmer Cox books.

Now, Palmer Cox debuted these stories in 1883 in an issue of St.

Nicholas Magazine.

He also compiled books, including The Brownies, Their Book.

The description from the publisher of this book reads this way: “The fanciful folk were inspired by Scottish folk tales but reflected the sensibility of 19th-century American children.

This is the first and best of the Brownie books, brimming with 24 short verse tales and more than 260 of the author’s whimsical illustrations.” And like I said, I actually bought a copy of this and read a little bit.

It’s a really cute book.

I mean, it’s about these little rascals that are just about a foot tall, it looks like, compared on the drawings.

And they have these like various like knit caps, I think, like they’re going on an adventure.

It’s not in color, unfortunately.

But like the one thing is about them riding a horse, there’s one about how they want to go ice skating.

So they break into this second-hand store at night when it’s closed.

Like they’re in there, and it’s all like rhymey, they’re like, “Oh, in here we’ll find the skates and out tonight we’ll go out and date.” You know what I mean? It’s like… but so at night they break in and capture these skates, then they go out and they’re like ice skating.

That’s really it.

Like, you know what I mean? Like that’s the story.

And then they’re done, they’re like, “Hey, we just liked ice skating.”

Speaker 2: Well, I like that they borrow them so they take them back to the…

Speaker 1: Yeah, they took them back, yeah.

But it seems like, you know, it’s like cute stories that are just a few pages long, written in a rhyming poem-like verse for kids, you know what I mean? Just about like they’re fooling around, but there’s not any real danger, right? So they’re like having a good time, they’re fooling around, no danger, which kind of sounds perfect if you’re trying to advertise a camera, right? I mean, that’s the adventurous spirit Eastman’s trying to instill in his Brownie users, right?

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 1: So originally, it actually even came with this like thin cardboard box that covered the Brownie, depicting a Brownie character.

Speaker 2: So like it came… it wasn’t on the camera, the Brownie…

Speaker 1: No, the Brownies are all very… yeah, printing and all that stuff, I think that would have been a bridge too far.

But this is like a printed-off like cardboard shell, very thin, that you just like slid on top of the other thing, you know what I mean? It’s like a full branding thing he did actually, because he actually goes on and in order to appeal to the kids with this, he had a Brownie Camera Club.

And kids could join it for free and enter club contests, and they also got like Kodak art brochures.

The camera came with a 54-page booklet with advice on how to take pictures.

So like I said, this is like a well-thought-out and financed campaign, right? It’s to hook new users from the start.

Everything is planned.

Speaker 2: It really well… is well-planned marketing.

Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s amazing.

Now, of course, there’s also advertising.

So let’s take a look at some of that.

And this isn’t Kodak’s first rodeo with advertising.

In fact, they have a rather famous campaign revolving around what is referred to as the Kodak Girl that predates this.

So let’s take a little detour on the Kodak Girl.

And the Kodak Girl ad campaign shows Eastman’s targeted approach at getting his new demographics to use his products.

Now, obviously, a lot of companies use good-looking women and men in a way that can be considered exploitative in advertising, right?

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1: Uh, so the original Kodak girl was very conservatively dressed, and in later incarnations, way past the scope of this show, they wore much more revealing outfits.

And in this case, I am personally not sure what is actually more exploitative: the fact that they were dressed like that or the way they used them in the ad.

So I’m going to rely on kodakgirl.com.

Uh, this is a very simple website, okay? This appears to have been made a while ago, it’s like an older site.

And this was made by a woman who at least lived through some of these advertising campaigns in the early going, first-hand.

So I found her views interesting, and it provides a good look at the overall campaign.

Now, this woman, I keep referring to her as “this woman” because she doesn’t give her name, so this was a little bit before everybody was like just throwing their name out on the internet.

However, she claims to have licensed the use of the Kodak Girl moniker from Kodak.

Anyway, her story is that she was a professional photojournalist and got her first Brownie as a child in 1946.

She goes on, quote, “George Eastman invented a camera simple enough for anyone to operate.” This was before the Brownie, parenthetically. “He then set out to market it to those he thought most likely to use it: women.

In 1893, he introduced the Kodak Girl, a fashionable, young, vibrant, and independent woman who often appeared in ads in a distinctive blue and white striped dress.

Until the mid-1920s, the Kodak Girl roamed the world freely, taking pictures as she went.” She says, “The minute I first saw one of these early ads at an antique show, I identified with this woman.

I was the Kodak Girl.

Unfortunately, in my 50s childhood, the Kodak Girl usually appeared as a life-sized cardboard cutout wearing a swimsuit and posing with a camera, standing at the entrance to a camera shop.”

She goes on to explain the original Kodak Girl in advertising.

Quote, “The women photographers in 1920s ads and earlier appeared vibrant, adventurous, and knowledgeable about their photographic equipment.

Unlike later ads in which beautiful women merely posed with a camera, the earlier ads showed independent women traveling and photographing the world.

No doubt this was meant to reinforce the idea of how easy it was to take pictures with a Kodak; even a woman could do it.”

And she also posts black and white ads dating back to 1894 showing some Kodak girls who were dressed in what appear to be very formal outfits and full-length dresses and bonnets, like they’re all dressed up, talking about, you know, basically using their camera, they’re walking about, they’re taking pictures in a field, it looks like they’re in front of an estate or something like that.

And overall, I think it’s an interesting way to look at the early advertising.

Like I said, I’m not sure which is actually worse: the like, “Hey, you know, they’re in a swimsuit, you know, to advertise the camera,” or “Hey, even women can do it.”

Speaker 2: Well, I go back to when you first mentioned the Kodak camera, the very first one.

I automatically thought of a socialite girl in New York walking around and taking pictures.

And to me, this kind of advertising, before we get to the swimsuit, we’re talking about like the 1890s advertising.

To me, you know, women didn’t have careers then.

They didn’t have anything to do.

Their hobbies were like embroidering and playing the piano.

You know, and they’re Victorian women, you know, like the higher-up women.

And this was just a way to appeal to that, like, “Oh look, now you have another thing that you can do.”

Speaker 1: Right.

Add to your…

Speaker 2: Yeah, you can go and take these pictures.

Speaker 1: Add to your repertoire of time-wasting, is that what you mean?

Speaker 2: Right, right! Oh, you don’t just draw, you don’t just, you know, play the piano or, you know, paint tables or whatever you did.

Now you can also add taking pictures with this camera to your…

Speaker 1: Yeah, it almost feels like if you did it a little bit earlier, this would be something they’d be doing in a Jane Austen book, right?

Speaker 2: Right, right! Like your accomplishment.

Look, you’re an accomplished woman.

This is… you can add this to your… “I’m a photographer.”

Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Oh, you don’t know how to take pictures? You didn’t get classes? Did you want your kids to take the classes?

Speaker 2: Right.

So I think that’s what he was trying to appeal to in the beginning, you know.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

I don’t think there’s anything too awful about it, but it’s also…

I’m from a different perspective, you know what I mean? I’m looking back at these ads and going, “Oh, these are cute ads,” and you know, when you think about it, you’re like, “God, that’s maybe kind of crappy.” I don’t know.

I don’t know how it was taken at the time either, and does that even matter if it was still crappy? So like again, that’s why I said, you know, it’s probably…

I’m not the best voice for this, so you know, we’ll let you and Kodak Girl have your opinion on that.

Speaker 2: Well, it’s just… it’s just an interesting way to look at the woman’s role in advertising, especially in this, you know, this… you’re trying to appeal to her because, you know, men are too busy going to the club and reading the newspapers and playing, you know, golf or cricket.

So, “Oh, we’ll get the woman to take the pictures,” kind of thing.

Speaker 1: Right.

And they actually, of course, doubled down on this strategy because like I said, now they’re gunning for the kids.

And they do this advertising in magazines like Youth’s Companion magazine.

One of the ads reads, quote, “A camera you and your dad can use together.” And this is what happened.

And the kids’ theme was actually eventually eased up on a bit, or at least coupled with the adult theme ads for the Brownie, because it turned out it caught on so quick and so well that Kodak wasn’t going to have to wait for future generations.

Now, he still ingrained it in future generations, Eastman is, but he didn’t have to wait.

And moms and dads were ready to buy this thing now.

So you got ads like “Kodak the children,” like it turned Kodak into a verb.

It’s like Googling something, you know what I mean? Like way back then, it’s like, “Oh, this is a verb now.

We’re going to Kodak these.” Like ads would show up in places like the Saturday Evening Post.

And like I just want to point this out because way back when, remember I was talking about his little journals? This is a novel scheme too, okay? People didn’t advertise cameras in regular magazines.

It was all just journals.

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 1: And as far as I know, this is like the first time it happened.

It’s straight to the average consumer instead of, you know, trade journals and this and that, that novices are never going to see anyway.

So you have your camera and your cute little character plastered on the side, and sales are going so well that the moms and dads want them.

So now what you have to do is you have to make it available.

So how do you do that? Again, Eastman takes some novel approaches to some novel challenges.

To begin with, the camera shops are not super interested in selling these.

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1: So you don’t think about this, like it’s a dollar.

They’re like, “We don’t want these.” So they don’t want to hold these cameras because there’s no money in it.

So what does Eastman come up with to challenge that? Well, first, he requires the dealers to keep them in stock if they want to have them.

Because he’s convinced once people saw this and held it in their hands and realized how easy it was, they’d use it and they’d want to take it home.

Which, I mean, this is like that’s what we’ve been trying to achieve this whole time, right? Like that’s the point.

You see this and it’s so easy and cheap, you’re like, “Oh, I’ll just take it.”

Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a dollar.

Speaker 1: But this is new because previously cameras were sold based on a display.

So now he has to overcome the profit margin issue like I mentioned.

So Eastman comes up with a plan that’ll let his dealers sell them on consignment, so they don’t have to risk losing on the inventory that he’s forcing them to have.

Now, in the end, we’re talking about such a tidal wave of sales that shops… they don’t want to be convinced of anything.

In fact, they’re probably not going to get their hands on them because pretty soon he’s going to be selling Brownies in corner drugstores.

So just how successful was the Brownie, commercially speaking? According to Brunnell, who of course had to actually make the cameras, they sold more than they could make, selling 5,000 immediately, as he put it.

In the end, 1,000 additional people were hired for Kodak Camera Works to keep up with the demand.

Speaker 2: Holy moly! A thousand people.

Speaker 1: In the first full year of sales, take a guess how many they sold.

Speaker 2: I want to say 10,000.

Speaker 1: 10,000 cameras? They sold 150,000 cameras.

Speaker 2: Oh my goodness.

Speaker 1: The previous record for any camera was 55,000.

Speaker 2: Well, that’s still a lot.

Speaker 1: All in all, now they said that was the first year, they sold 245,000.

And that’s just the first model.

I mean, technically there was actually a slight defect in the first model and that got corrected, so I don’t know if they’re getting thrown in there too, but that was like in Europe, I think.

But anyway, in the first 10 years, there’s dozens of models.

There’s new basic models and then there’s ones that cost like a little bit more, so you have something to upgrade to.

It’s like get them hooked and then give them something better.

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 1: The immediate successor is the Brownie number one.

I think in some sense they call the other one Brownie zero retroactively.

This is the camera, this Brownie number one, that Ansel Adams’ aunt gave him for his first visit to Yosemite National Park at age 14 in 1916, where he took his first photos.

Speaker 2: Oh wow.

Speaker 1: This camera, they made 522,000 of them.

And then comes Brownie number two, which cost $2 to $2.50.

The upcharge was because you could actually get the box in color.

Speaker 2: Oh.

Speaker 1: Not the pictures.

The box.

Speaker 2: [laughs]

Speaker 1: This was produced from 1901 to 1935.

They sold over 1.5 million before 1921.

Speaker 2: Wow.

Speaker 1: Interestingly, this model actually used 120 roll film, which you can still get today.

And they made the box metal, so you can still use it today.

Um, you can actually use mine too.

There is actually a way to get the film and convert it to the roll holder for this camera and then take it and develop the film.

So… but these numbers are staggering.

Right off the bat, 150,000 in the first year.

I mean, it really just all came together.

And those years of trying to make a cheap, easy process, all those brushes with insolvency while they tried to perfect their film, their plate, all these products, the deliberate decision to literally make a market of casual users, the brilliance of how it all came together, and then the advertising and sales scheme to get it into people’s hands.

Like I said, I just can’t think of a more successful analogy.

Just making a market and satisfying it at almost the exact same time.

I mean, to me it’s amazing.

Speaker 2: It’s staggering how… how fast it…

Speaker 1: Yeah, it just takes off immediately then after all this stuff.

It just… then it just goes, it goes wild.

Now, just to put a cap on the lasting legacy of the Brownie itself, there are a few different sources on this.

I think it’s because it depends what you consider to be a model itself, like its own model of a Brownie.

But there are almost 200 versions in the next 60 years after its release.

Technically the end was apparently 1986.

Kodak made a flash camera they sold in Brazil.

It was called the Brownie 2.

I don’t know why, nobody seems to know if there’s any relevance to this.

But more fittingly, the end came in 1980 to 1982.

It was called the Brownie and was marketed as, quote, “designed in 1979 for the 100th anniversary occurring in 1980 of the founding of George Eastman’s company.” So that was actually like a little bit more of a…

Speaker 2: Anniversary, yeah.

Speaker 1: …nice bookend.

Now, this is the direct legacy, more in the sense of the lineage of the camera.

The actual legacy is obviously so much more.

The Brownie made a market.

It made a culture.

And it made Kodak a household name.

Speaker 2: It sounds like it made Kodak a verb too.

Speaker 1: Yeah, it did.

Well, the Kodak actually did that, but they were Kodakers, so yeah, the name gets expanded.

Yeah.

People often took pictures of their family members and then the photo album became even a more popular thing to have.

I mean, when you step back, the ability to take a snapshot and have someone else develop changes everything.

It’s no longer a job.

It’s no longer a technical skill.

It’s not dangerous.

It doesn’t need to be an obsession.

It’s just easy, right? Like you can just separate all the work out.

And I mean, I don’t think TV like would be a big deal if you had to make your own TV shows, right?

Speaker 2: Right.

Apples to oranges, but you get what I’m saying.

Like you’re not going to like do all this work to watch TV either, you know.

It’s because you just sit there and turn it on.

Speaker 1: And as Gustafson puts it, the Brownie created an industry.

And the Kodak and other models deserve their legacy as well.

I tried to point that out as we went, you know, making it possible for amateurs to take pictures with ease and, you know, and taking out a lot of the hard work in the process because you could just send back your camera and get the film developed.

But the Brownie took this to the next level because you could do the same thing but now it was only a dollar and the film was even cheaper.

So now almost anyone who wanted one could get one.

Anyone could take a picture with the press of a button.

No experience, just the button.

As Brayer put it, the revolution began in 1888 when the Kodak camera made photography accessible to anyone who had $25, was completed in 1900 when the Brownie camera made photography accessible to anyone who had a dollar.

The ultimate in democratic photography.

Or as the trade mags put it, “Plant the Brownie acorn and the Kodak oak will grow.” That’s how they said things back then, I guess.

So let’s end with the far-reaching cultural impact.

I have posited in my editorial aspect of this show that this is how our modern world of social media and life through snapshots was born, maybe conceived, depending how you look at it.

But at the time, there was also some immediate cultural impacts.

And it’s the ubiquity of picture-taking that I think eventually overcomes them.

I mean, once upon a time, it’s hard to believe, there was a thing called an expectation of privacy in this country.

Used to be a thing.

I often wonder what the Supreme Court justices who all dealt with these cases in the early going when it was like really a hot topic would think about the world today.

I mean, they are so worried about the government taking our privacy.

Who knew in time people would just give it away on YouTube? Right?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Now, of course I’m saying this tongue-in-cheek, it’s still a thing.

But effectively, you know, privacy has a different definition now.

Speaker 2: Just the CCTV camera footage that’s everywhere.

Speaker 1: Right.

It’s a different world.

But when the Kodak came out, they certainly were not ready to let go of their privacy.

Not everybody.

These casual picture-takers were creating scandals.

In fact, the Hartford Courant mourned, “Beware the Kodak.

The sedate citizen can’t indulge in any hilariousness without incurring the risk of being caught in the act and having his photograph passed among his Sunday school children.” The fear that your reputation could migrate into the ether far beyond your control was hatched.

It started out with those Kodakers, as they were called, casual picture-takers.

And these Kodakers were the precursor to modern-day life.

Here’s some examples.

In 1901, the victim of a stagecoach robbery insisted on photographing the robber who had his rifle pointed at the driver.

Speaker 2: [laughs]

Speaker 1: During the Boer War, a noble was captured and handed over his pistol and his purse, but he refused to give up his Kodak.

In 1905, a trial coined the term “Kodak freaks” to explain the phenomenon.

Judge said, “Wherever they go and whoever they see and whatever place they have come to, they have got to have a Kodak along for the purpose of getting pictures.”

Speaker 2: It sounds like today.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

I mean, just think about how much this changes the world, right? It’s really amazing.

Like from a world of photography being in the hands of a few professionals like dedicated enough to drag around a darkroom tent in a wagon and learn all that stuff, we travel through a world of people deemed as freaks taking pictures of everything they want as they go to a world now that one source says will be 2.1 trillion photos taken in 2025.

In 2024 it was 5.3 billion a day, 61,000 per second, 61,400 per second. 14 billion photos are shared daily on social media.

Just imagine what the judge at that trial in 1905 would think.

I mean, the freaks are obviously no longer the ones taking pictures of everything.

They’re the ones who aren’t.

Speaker 2: That’s true.

Speaker 1: And with that, we’re going to wrap it up.

So it’s time for the summation and Julia’s big takeaway.

Julia, what was your favorite part of the show?

Speaker 2: Uh, well, besides the Brownies, which are super cute and I had no idea about them, I was thinking about this and… and this goes a little bit to the first episode, um, just the wagons traveling and being like some guy, like a farmer, and, you know, flim-flam show comes to town and they’re selling you medicine and there’s also this guy that’s taking your picture.

And your first reaction in my mind is probably like, “Oh, what is this magic? Witch kind of thing,” right? And then it… it just… how fast it gets to the point where now that guy, that farmer, is probably like, “Well, I’m going to go get one of those.” It’s… it’s staggering.

Speaker 1: Yeah, when it gets down to a dollar…

Speaker 2: It’s… it’s quite… yeah, it’s such a vision.

And it… it really is in a lifetime, you know, much like in our lifetime how we went with the cell phone and the social media, the… the advancement is so fast and the spread of it is so fast that it’s… it’s pretty impressive.

Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure.

And uh, for my summation, so to speak, first of all, I’m just going to mention briefly that I know the whole story about the Kodak employee inventing digital photography.

Uh, I don’t go into that here because…

Speaker 2: That’s not what this is about.

Speaker 1: Right, yeah.

It… it’s not really relevant either.

So because to me it’s just another link in the chain.

Like maybe…

Speaker 2: It’s just the next step in the process.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

We’ll cover that in the carp pod.

Just be a big hodgepodge of stuff.

The carp and cameras.

Okay.

So this show is not about technological advancement.

This show is not about the nitty-gritty of technological advancement.

It’s about the technological advancement that led to modern culture and the modern culture that came out of those technological advancements and the neat things that happened on the way.

Speaker 2: It’s… it’s that journey.

It’s quite a journey.

Speaker 1: Try to add a little bit about the people and stuff.

Not whether or not Kodak could have made a few more million bucks before everyone threw away their digital camera and bought a cell phone.

Like honestly, the only digital camera I ever owned was a Kodak, so to me the answer as far as I’m concerned is no.

Speaker 2: And you know what, they did alright.

They’re… they’re fine.

Speaker 1: But to me, the current successor to the Brownie, what I’ve been getting at with this whole time, like I said with my editorial aspects, the successor is Instagram and TikTok.

The Brownie created a world where privacy would disappear, a world where everything could and would be photographed.

And the progression from that is these social media apps where many of us now essentially live our lives and get basically all of our culture from.

Speaker 2: And our social interaction.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

It went from recording life to documenting history to saving memories of cherished loved ones and events to being so enamored with the concept that now we create our own little world with these photos and basically live there.

It’s a world of perfect little snapshots.

But let’s focus instead on the amazing part.

You can take a picture of anything.

You can save any memory.

You can see old family members with almost no effort.

You can just take pictures.

In short, the Brownie was an amazing pinnacle of past achievement and the seminal product of the future it created.

And that will do it.

Thank you so much for visiting us here at the Informatorium.

We wish you a happy, healthy, and beautiful journey until we see you again.

Look on the bright side and good luck.

Speaker 2: Bye!