The windows are down, and burning leaves scent the air. You’re driving down the road on a warm autumn day. In 1932, in great pain from a spinal disease, Eastman ended his own life after writing to friends that his work was done and “Why wait?” By the time he reached his late 30s, he was on the way to becoming a wealthy leader of the industry, a philanthropist, a leader in establishing worker benefits and profit sharing, and one of the first to promote a woman to an executive position. And George Eastman made cameras and photography a part of everyday life.Įastman never married and spent his early life trying to support his mother and siblings. The rise of mobile phones and digital cameras spelled doom for traditional film cameras, but photography was at the cutting edge of technology when Kodak was founded in the 19th century. Perhaps a bit prophetically, Eastman argued that “The world is moving, and a company that contents itself with present accomplishments soon falls behind.” Once a dominant player in the camera and film market, Eastman Kodak has fallen on hard times in the 21st century. In 1935, Eastman Kodak introduced Kodachrome film, and suddenly, the world was documented in color. He thought the letter K was strong and wanted his film to have a short, pleasant-sounding, easily remembered the name: Kodak. Eastman invented the word with his mother using scrabble tiles. The name Kodak referred not only to the camera but also to the film. Kodak cameras rank among the earliest examples of modern subscription services and products in many ways. It inspired the company slogan: You push the button, we do the rest. The company would process the photos, reload the camera and send it all back to the photographer. The film was pre-loaded with the original Kodak camera and allowed the user to snap 100 photos before mailing the camera back to Eastman Kodak. In 1888, he introduced the Kodak camera, making the film roll easy to use. The roll made it possible to take black-and-white pictures one after another in sequence. He developed the idea of a film roll in his kitchen in 1884 at age 34. “What we do during our working hours,” Eastman later said, “determines what we have what we do in our leisure hours determines what we are.”īut Eastman’s leisure hours earned him a vast fortune and changed how we think about leisure in the process. Early on, Eastman founded a photography business and pursued photography as an entrepreneur and a passion project. Self-educated and from a modest background, George Eastman created one of the world’s great technology companies, Eastman Kodak, and put cameras and photographs into the hands of everyday people in everyday situations.Įastman’s father died when he was young, forcing George to leave school to support his mother and siblings. If you have a snapshot of your great-aunt Gladys from 1940, you can thank George Eastman, the father of consumer cameras. This early machine was massive, like those clunky airport luggage scanners. In the 1980s, David Humble, the president of an electronics company, came up with a novel idea while stuck in a long grocery store line: Why not let customers do the scanning? In 1984, the first automated checkout machine (ACM), the CheckRobot, was introduced. Of course, self-service fetching was just the first step. This model eventually became the modern standard. ![]() Instead of clerks fetching goods, customers put in the work themselves. Then, in 1916, Clarence Saunders implemented a radical change, launching a self-service grocery store in Memphis called Piggly Wiggly, according to Smithsonian Magazine. Go back to the turn of the 20th century, and you’d tell the clerks what you needed, and they’d retrieve it for you. Self-service grocery stores, in general, are a relatively new concept. Who thought self-checkout was a good idea? ![]() Rescan this, place that here, and so on and so forth. Only, as you scan the goods, the checkout system starts arguing with you. But hey, wait! You can use the self-checkout line. The checkout lines spill into the grocery store aisles, and you suddenly regret swinging by to pick up dinner.
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