You Press The Button, We Do The Rest

No, George Eastman did not invent photography, nor did  he did  invent film.  What George Eastman did was see that the average person on the street would, given the chance, take pictures of their own.  Before Eastman and Kodak came along, photographers needed a basic knowledge of chemistry, a light tight laboratory of their own, and a willingness to carry around a large camera that took photos on glass plate negatives and had to be used with a tripod.  Eastman understood that if photography was made easy, photography would spread to the masses.  His first attempt at mass market cameras, the detective, was a huge failure.  It was his second try, the  Kodak, that made his company a giant of American manufacturing.

George Eastman's idea was to build a camera that literally needed no real skill to operate.  It was sold pre-loaded with a strip of film that could take 100 separate images; point and shoot, send the camera with the film still loaded back to Kodak, and Kodak would develop the film, make a single print of each image, reload the camera and mail the whole thing back to the camera's owner.  Of course, at $25 in 1887, for the camera and film, true amateur photography was still limited to the well established members of the middle class and above, but in time that would all change.  In 1900, Eastman introduced the first Brownie camera with a list price of $1.00 with  no film included.

When I was a child,way back in the early 1960's, a cheap 127 camera made by Ansco could be had for $10, and a twelve exposure roll of film could be developed and printed for $5.  The focus might have left something to be desired, and the plastic lenses didn't cut a super sharp negative, but then again, even poor people could take snapshots of their kids.

In all the years I've been collecting old photographs, this is the first time I've found a photograph from the original Kodak mass market camera.  I don't know why George Eastman chose a format that gave round prints, but that's how they can be identified.  In 1887, the Kodak prints were 2 1/2 inches in diameter, in 1888, the size went up to 3 1/2 inches, which is what this particular print is.  Written on the back, "Me and my den as seen through a Kodak."