American entrepreneur and inventor George Eastman (1854-1932) became fascinated by photography in 1874. He pioneered a process making dry plates for photography and formed the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company to produce them.
In 1889 he patented a system where photographic emulsion was coated onto a roll of flexible paper. The basis of this process was devised by a chemistry student, Henry Reichenbach, at Eastman's company. This convenient foil film on a transparent base replaced the fragile, unwieldy glass plate. Paper film created an unsatisfactory grainy image and was later replaced by a cellulose nitrate film that was unbreakable.
Eastman came up with the trademark "Kodak." His early Kodak camera was a wooden, handheld box with a simple lens, and a fraction-of-a-second shutter. This box camera was preloaded with enough film for 100 exposures. After all the negatives had been exposed, the whole camera was returned to the factory and the film developed. Prints were made and returned to the owner together with the negatives and the reloaded camera. By 1901 Eastman had introduced the "Brownie" roll-film camera. He had successfully wrested photography from the elite: everybody could now become a photographer.
Eastman's flexible transparent film was the basis of the nascent motion picture industry, used in Thomas Edison's kinetoscope from 1891. The introduction of Kodachrome color film with three dye layers in 1935 popularized color photography.
