Made In America - Bill Bryson [153]
Often all didn’t go well. The film Eastman used at first was made of paper, which tore easily and had to be carefully stripped of its emulsion before the exposures could be developed. It wasn’t until the invention of celluloid roll film by a sixty-five-year-old Episcopalian minister named Hannibal Goodwin in Newark, New Jersey – this truly was the age of the amateur inventor – that amateur photography became a reliable undertaking. The Revd Goodwin didn’t call his invention film but ‘photographic pellicule’, and, as was usual, spent years fighting costly legal battles with Eastman without ever securing the recognition or financial pay-off he deserved – though eventually, years after Goodwin’s death, Eastman was ordered to pay $5 million to the company that inherited the patent.
In 1888 Eastman changed the name of the camera to ‘Kodak’ – an odd choice since it was meaningless, and in 1888 no one gave meaningless names to products, especially successful products. Since British patent applications at the time demanded a full explanation of trade and brand names, we know how Eastman arrived at his inspired name. As he crisply summarized it in his patent application: ‘First. It is short. Second. It is not capable of mispronunciation. Third. It does not resemble anything in the art and cannot be associated with anything in the art except the Kodak.’3 Four years later the whole enterprise was renamed the Eastman Kodak Company.
Despite the considerable expense involved – a Kodak camera sold for $25 and each roll of film cost $10, including developing – by 1895, over a hundred thousand Kodaks had been sold and Eastman was a seriously wealthy man. (A lifelong bachelor, he lived with his mother in a 37-room mansion with 12 bathrooms.) Soon people everywhere were talking about snapshots, originally a British shooting term for a hastily executed shot. Its photographic sense was coined by the English astronomer Sir John Herschel, who also gave the world the terms positive and negative in their photographic senses.4
From the outset Eastman developed three crucial strategies that have been the hallmarks of virtually every successful consumer-goods company since. First, he went for the mass market, reasoning that it was better to make a little money each from a lot of people rather than a lot of money from a few. He also showed a tireless, obsessive dedication to making his products better and cheaper. In the 1890s such an approach was widely perceived as insane. If you had a successful product you milked it for all it was worth. If competitors came along with something better, you bought them out or tried to squash them with lengthy patent fights or other bullying tactics. What you certainly did not do was create new products that made your existing lines obsolete. Eastman did. Throughout the late 1890s Kodak introduced a series of increasingly cheaper, niftier cameras – the Bull’s Eye model of 1896, which cost just $12, and the famous, slimline Folding Pocket Kodak of 1898 – before finally in 1900 producing his eureka model: the little box Brownie, priced at just $1 and with film at 15 cents a reel (though with only six exposures per reel).
What set Eastman apart above all was the breathtaking lavishness of his advertising. In 1899 alone, he spent $750,000, an unheard-of-sum, on advertising. Moreover it was good advertising: crisp, catchy, reassuringly trustworthy. ‘You press the button – we do the rest’ ran the company’s first slogan, thus making a virtue of its shortcomings. Never mind that you couldn’t load or unload the film yourself. Kodak would do it for you. In 1905 it followed with another classic slogan: ‘If It Isn’t An Eastman, It Isn’t A Kodak.’5
Kodak’s success did