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That industry, the manufacture of cameras and films and their distribution to every city of the hemispheres, explains why the public followed Mr. Eastman's movements more than they followed the movements of other adventurers. News papers reported his preparations at the end of last year for this African hunt; they reported his coming out of the rough in the early part of March ; they reported as merrily as they dared his escape (in pajamas, full dress trousers and slippers) from a train burning between Luxor and Cairo, Egypt. Correspondents cabled of his departure from Cairo and of his arrival at Naples at the end of March. They met him at Rome and, in the city where Pope Gregory XIII promulgated the present Gregorian calendar, heard him again urge adoption of "my one hobby at present"—a calendar of 13 months with 28 days each (TIME, Nov. 21, 1927, et ante).
From Rome he went sightseeing leisurely, a man who at 74 has his vast business in able hands,** to Florence. Venice, Milan, Paris, where Dr. Albert D. Kaiser his personal physician on the African expedition, finally left his party. In Paris Mr. Eastman paused to inspect the Pathe factory which the Eastman company recently bought. After Paris were to come visits to the two Eastman factories at Berlin and one in Austria. Mr. Eastman finds it entertaining to examine the institutions that his early work with camera and films has created.
When George Eastman first worked with cameras, they were cumbersome boxes "almost the size of a soap box." That was in 1878 when he was 24, a bank clerk at Rochester, N. Y. Without leaving his bank job, he applied his mechanical ingenuity to making cameras handy. He succeeded.
Negatives at that time were made on wet plates, a sheet of glass covered with collodion and silver nitrate (sensitive to light) a few minutes before exposure. George Eastman, no scientist himself, tried empirically to invent dry plates covered with silver nitrate and gelatine. After trials and troubles which a thorough knowledge of colloidal chemistry, as he later learned, might have prevented, he succeeded in this effort.
Next he applied his gelatine to a strip of paper, which might be rolled compactly. And that led to a new kind of camera, the Kodak (1888). Mr. Eastman invented the name by fiddling with a batch of separate letters until he put together a group that looked alluring and sounded sensible. The word is now a common noun, verb and radical in European languages. It appears in standard dictionaries.***
Next (in 1889) came the cellulose film that has made amateur photography a joy and made possible the cinema, one of the 10 largest U. S. industries.
Mr. Eastman did not of course accomplish all this progress in photography by his sole effort. By this time he was calling on professional scientists for information and aid; and it is with "thanks to the effort of Eastman scientists," as he, with native courtesy, states in Eastman Kodak advertisements, that the science and art of photography has gone so far.