George eastman biography invention of the wheel
He was a high school dropout, judged "not especially gifted" when measured against the academic standards of the day. He was poor, but even as a young man, he took it upon himself to support his widowed mother and two sisters, one of whom had polio.
He began his business career as a year old office boy in an insurance company and followed that with work as a clerk in a local bank.
He was George Eastman, and his ability to overcome financial adversity, his gift for organization and management, and his lively and inventive mind made him a successful entrepreneur by his mid-twenties, and enabled him to direct his Eastman Kodak Company to the forefront of American industry.
But building a multinational corporation and emerging as one of the nation's most important industrialists required dedication and sacrifice. It did not come easily.
The youngest of three children, George Eastman was born to Maria Kilbourn and George Washington Eastman on July 12, in the village of Waterville, some 20 miles southwest of Utica, in upstate New York. The house on the old Eastman homestead, where his father was born and where George spent his early years, has since been moved to the Genesee Country Museum in Mumford, N.Y., outside of Rochester
When George was five years old, his father moved the family to Rochester. There the elder Eastman devoted his energy to establishing Eastman Commercial College. Then tragedy struck. George's father died, the college failed and the family became financially distressed.
George continued school until he was Then, forced by family circumstances, he had to find employment.
His first job, as a messenger boy with an insurance firm, paid $3 a week. A year later, he became office boy for another insurance firm. Through his own initiative, he soon took charge of policy filing and even wrote policies. His pay increased to $5 per week.
But, even with that increase, his income was not enough to meet family expenses. He studied accounting at h
George Eastman: A Biography [Reprint ed.]
Citation preview
Digitized by the Internet Archive in The Gilded Age was a time of sweeping changes. From roughly to , the United States transformed from a largely agrarian society of farmers and small producers to an industrial economy based in large cities. During those few short decades, there was also an explosion of innovation in the fields of engineering, chemistry and technology, which brought us some of the modern world’s most groundbreaking inventions. As early as , an Italian inventor named Antonio Meucci demonstrated a “talking telegraph” that he called a telettrofono, an electromagnetic device that could transmit speech over electrical wires. But Meucci, who had immigrated to the United States, fell on hard times and wasn’t able to renew a temporary patent for his device, which expired in By , two more inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, were racing to develop a patentable design for the telephone. According to Patent Office records, Bell’s lawyers filed his patent application just hours before Gray on February 14, Both Gray and Meucci sued Bell for stealing their idea, but the Scottish inventor—who fought off hundreds more court challenges to his patent—retained sole credit. WATCH: "Alexander Graham Bell: Voice of Invention" on HISTORY Vault. Thomas Edison and his phonograph Thomas Edison was by far the most prolific and well-known inventor of the Gilded Age, and his fame started with the phonograph, the first machine for recording and playing back sound. In the s, Edison invented a device that could record telegraph messages by making indentations on a scroll of tape that corresponded with the telegraph’s electrical impulses. Edison’s next goal was more ambitious. He wanted to capitalize on the popularity of Bell’s telephone by recording telephone calls the same way that he recorded telegrams. Edison figured out that he could use a flexible diaphragm to capture the vibrations of sound waves and then etch them into a sheet of paraffin wax Brighton resident Elizabeth Brayer wrote the definitive biography of Rochester&#;s most famous business founder and benefactor, &#;George Eastman: A Biography,&#; in
GEORGE EASTMAN
GEORGE
EASTMAN A BIOGRAPHY Elizabeth Brayer
Hi University of
Rochester Press
Copyright
© Elizabeth Brayer
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
George Eastman: A Biography © The Johns Hopkins University Press by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
First published
Reprint edition published by the University of Rochester Press University of Rochester Press
Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY , USA and Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP 12 3DF, UK
ISBN: gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Rochester Public Library/Monroe County Library System and Kirtas Technologies, Inc., of Victor, NY, who provided the scanning technology
The University of Rochester Press
and services
that
made
this reprint possible.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
CIP applied
for but not received at time of publication.
Frontispiece: George Eastman,
This publication
is
(EKC)
printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
For Sheldon
and our children Sarah, David, Anne, Jennifer, and Caroline and grandchildren Oliver, Harriett, Nicholas, and Olivia
~-v V
CONTENTS Preface and Acknowledgments Prologue:
ix
The Housewarming
1
Beginnings
I
1
2 3
II
4
Eastmans and Kilbourns An Amateur There Scoop the World
"You Press the Button .
.
We Do
6
7
Photos by the Mile
III
The Gay
9
Prince Henry and
.
.
59 73 94
Nineties the Earl of East
11
A Salute for the Czar GE versus Albion’s City
12
The Power
13
Crazy about Color
IV 1. Telephone ()
2. Phonograph ()
She recently sat down with the Rochester Business Journal to talk about the Eastman she discovered through her research.
Far from the popular perception of a &#;grumpy old cardboard figure that never had any fun,&#; Brayer found a playful, competitive citizen of the world. Eastman possessed a rare mix of drive and compassion. And he was as much molded by Rochester as Rochester was built by him, she said.
During the interview, Brayer touched on Eastman&#;s personality, lifestyle and business efforts, among other areas. An edited transcript of the interview follows.
ROCHESTER BUSINESS JOURNAL: Eastman started the business as a sideline when he was working at Rochester Savings Bank. You write that when he was passed over for a promotion at the bank (in favor of a bank director&#;s relative), he quit. &#;&#;George is a damn fool,&#; scoffed one banker, &#;to give up a wonderful position for a will o&#; the wisp!'&#; Would you call this a defining moment, the fact that he went with Kodak full time at that point?
ELIZABETH BRAYER: He was young enough to take a risk maybe?-and he did. He was the sole supporter of his mother, of course. He quit school at 13 because after his father died it turned out there was no income. The business school (Eastman&#;s father, George W. Eastman, operated Eastman&#;s Commercial College in Rochester and branch cities) had been going well, yet-well, he always thought an uncle had ruined the business school. So he felt he had to go to work to support his mother. But he stayed on at the bank for a year and a half after he started the dry-plate business, till September The nepotism incident pushed him over the edge. It also defined his relationship with employees later on.
RBJ: In what way?
BRAYER: Well, he had a lot of pressure since he was hiring