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Foreword to George Eastman: A Biography by Elizabeth Brayer
by George M.C. Fisher
(former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Eastman Kodak Company)
George Eastman's life in photography spans the half-century from 1880 to 1930, when science, technology and culture converged to create "new products" of all sorts. Automobiles. X-rays. Cubist paintings. Light bulbs. World war. Skyscrapers. Relativity theory. Jazz.
And snapshots.
Like Alexander Graham Bell, Eastman tinkered his way to a universally welcome invention. Like Henry Ford, he put his name on his company. Like Thomas Edison, he shaped his products to world markets hungry for their startling benefits.
But we do not need a biography to tell us that. We already know the who, what, where, when. It's the how we want to know - even more, the why. Was Eastman really so gifted? Or was he simply a moment ahead
of his time, a step ahead of the competition? What was he like? What was his mind like? Was he happy?
Elizabeth Brayer leads us to as many of these answers as we are likely to discover. She shows how George Eastman applied his l9th-century self-reliance to an age suddenly thriving with invention, mass production, and free markets. And she leads us to see how technology came to affect daily life in ways that continue today.
To illustrate, glance down at your wrist.
The second-hand sweeps (or the digits flicker) with a silent precision never imagined by the great watchmakers of Zurich. Yet ask anyone just how a twenty dollar watch works - just what is it that the quartz gizmo does, anyway - and chances are you'll face puzzled annoyance.
Ask someone what a microwave is. Or a microprocessor. Ask someone how word processors work, or satellite dishes. Fax machines. Color film.
If there were a slogan for our age it might read: "You press the button. 'It' will somehow do the rest."
Science may have demystified nature, but technology mystifies us. That's OK; we don't really need to know how the CD player works to enjoy it.
Yet all this progress has come with subtle costs. Each gift our technology bestows - photos of the atom, maps of genes, chemical analyses of the hearts of stars - seems to add another brick to a wall that stands between us and our comprehension of the world.
That was not always the case. In the world George Eastman grew up in, people knew how things worked. The farmer could fix a broken wagon.
People also knew why the world worked the way it did. If a l9th-century minister could not fix a broken watch, he could at least peer into its gears, weights and springs and get a pretty good idea of how the mechanism moved. He might even divine a theme to propel his Sunday sermon.
Even when the reasons behind the rules were a bit cloudy, few doubted their truth. Self-reliant people might face danger, but the abundant land offered endless opportunities for the crafty and the brave. The rewards were out there no matter who your parents were, where you went to school - or when you dropped out.
George Eastman dropped out when he was thirteen, a year after Horatio Alger surfaced in print. Like Tom Swift and the wonderfully named Oliver Optic, Alger's heroes reflected the possibilities people felt in the air. Provided you used your wits. Provided you had tenacity, what people then called "sticktoitiveness."
We see the young Eastman staying awake around the clock for five days straight - week after week - to get his fledgling dry photographic plate business off the ground.
We see him personally mixing 450 batches of emulsion only to fail to fix a quality problem, then sailing off to Europe to find its source.
We see a chef who insisted on mastering every variation of the art of cooking an egg before moving on to other dishes.
We see Eastman in his darkroom where, he said, "I have the most fun of all."
We see a sportsman who "spent more time fishing, hunting and camping in more sections of North America and Africa than Theodore Roosevelt."
"Modern advertising can be said to begin," one writer noted, "with the slogan 'You press the button; we do the rest.'" We see the man who wrote that slogan writing, rewriting, editing the instructions for the early Kodak camera, tightening the words until they clicked into place.
We see a delighted plumber who "would rather wipe a lead joint well than anything I know."
We find a man who believed there was no such thing as too much music, who would attend two operas a day, who had a string quartet playing during breakfast.
We discover a wealthy citizen who oversaw the design of every aspect of his mansion and when, dissatisfied with the proportions of his music room, cut the house in half to get it right.
We encounter a social engineer who designed medical and dental programs for children, housing projects for his workers, a center of music for his community.
We see a man who wrote 200,000 letters.
We discover a philanthropist who gave away $100,000,000 to institutions of his very particular choosing.
We find a man who gave money to black colleges when such gifts were unheard of.
We see him build a company. We see him introduce snapshots to the world, fretting always, always, over the details. We see him labor over new products, shrewdly running his finances, adding experts, and expanding his capital plant with steady, persistent control.
We see Kodak people becoming something like a family for him. "The surprising depth of loyalty" he inspired in his staff stemmed in large part from his countless acts of kindness, his enlightened personnel policies, and his tireless working habits.
Brayer notes: "None of his employees could hope to match Eastman's own energy and capacity for work, but there was something about his example that stirred emulation. They often worked overtime, faithful to the employer who often stayed at State Street until three in the morning."
To others, of course, he seemed aloof, partly because his inner intensity left him oblivious to casual greetings and small talk. "Extremely reticent," a man who was "at his best with children," he valued his friendships as fiercely as he guarded his privacy.
It's an important point. Reticence throws up walls. Eastman remained a private man. No one was permitted to peer for long into his heart or mind.
People so well known, yet so private, tend to become mythologized through trivia and gossip. While there was never much gossip about George Eastman, his image has flattened into a a sketchy portrait of an eccentric genius fashioned by a collage of anecdotes. People recall a stern inventor, perhaps a little odd, who lived alone in a great mansion, lavishing money on personal projects: then, finally, ending his own life.
Brayer's rigorously researched book corrects that impression. Her story is clear. George Eastman was an American original. He remained largely unaffected by fashion, opinion, formal religion, or any idea that did not make sense to him. He was in tune with a time of great transformation, when many of the values and assumptions of an earlier age changed with
swift finality.
Brayer quotes a reporter in 1927: "Quite
possibly George Eastman may be the last great Yankee American. He pertains to that America which began to dim and fade in the
middle 1880s."
The l9th century is itself a character in Brayer's text. As G.K. Chesterton wrote the "spirit
of the century produced great men because it thought men were great. ...And by encouraging greatness in everybody it naturally encouraged superlative greatness in some."
The great Yankees seem cast from Emerson's transcendental molds: clear-eyed, disciplined, self-reliant, whose
intense focus astonished those who worked with him. "His power of concentration was so overwhelming that nothing could penetrate the fog," Brayer reports. We find him repeatedly engaged in work that mattered to himself and to others - nearly always surpassing his own challenge, only to move on to another without breaking stride.
"The fun is in the doing," Eastman once said, "and not in the mostly unintelligible holler about it."
But great empirical instincts, intense native ability, a relentless capacity to take on challenge, and the ability to focus on imminent problems were not the whole story.
George Eastman knew that power in the 20th century would belong to people who were not simply literate but numerate.
Before the Industrial Revolution, literacy was the path to nearly all knowledge. Those who studied rhetoric could turn words into intellectual and emotional levers, pleasures, weapons.
But with the rise of invention, it became clear that mathematical notational systems and symbolic language
- numeracy - could turn raw physical and chemical materials into real levers, pleasures, weapons. The numerate would come to run the world. That Eastman saw this so clearly, so early, and invested in it so lavishly is singularly remarkable.
He never spoke about it. Brayer doesn't write about it. But she gives us considerable evidence for it. Consider his experience with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1890, Eastman hired his first MIT graduate, a mechanical engineer named Darragh de Lancey, who found a way to coat film continuously. This was arguably the most useful invention in the history of photographic manufacturing, enabling both uniform quality and enormous cost efficiency. Eastman wrote that de Lancey "switched Kodak Park from the empirical to the scientific path." MIT graduates were welcome at Kodak from that time on.
Eastman's stupendous contribution to MIT, some $20 million, was given between 1912 and 1920 on condition the donor be identified only as "Mr. Smith". Similar gifts made possible the growth of the University of Rochester and the Rochester Institute of Technology. Such investments
are really acts of faith; there is no way to measure their return. But these were an important part of Eastman's investment in photography as a science. And that, you could say, paid off quite handsomely.
In 1996, people will take some 65 billion pictures, most with cameras that owe their basic design to Eastman's first roll-film models. Hundreds of thousands of people owe livelihoods to the photo industry and the countless businesses it touches, from movie studios in Hollywood to minilabs in Japan. Photography's contributions so pervade our lives that isolating their value is impossible.
It is impossible, too, to measure Eastman's contribution to his times and ours. He is best left summed up simply: George Eastman was a creator.
We assign the label "creative" to talented people whose inspired work no one else can replicate - artists, poets, musicians. We seldom apply it to engineers or business people.
But Eastman would be high on such a list. Photography had been around for forty years when he started his business. By inventing roll film, designing the cameras for it, setting up a company to produce it, and coining its unmistakable brand, he created a world market almost single-handedly.
But there was another creation at the center of photography's subtle "value proposition". He gave the gift of creativity to the rest of us.
Few of us can paint or sing or dance as
gracefully as we'd like. But the first snapshooters quickly
found that with care (and a bit of luck) anyone could take a
picture that captured the spirit of people or a place. Family
portraits became household treasures. Landscapes could evoke
something more than scenery. Newspaper photographs put a face
to history. Thus did a yellow box stamped with a name known everywhere
come to create the enduring images of 20th century life.
There is a brass plaque on a wall at MIT where George Eastman's portrait is raised in relief. For decades, students walking to final exams have reached up and rubbed its nose for luck, and it has acquired a polished sheen.
Eastman's intellectual heirs will need their luck. The stakes have risen for every player in every important game. Science and commerce offer more adventure than ever. Markets for innovation are exploding. Cultures are merging as others collide. Bold ideas spring in and out of fashion overnight. Technology and terror dance in harness on the evening news.
George Eastman's reactions to today's "new products" - from digital cameras to the worldwide web - can only be imagined. But as he considered the mystery, risk and abundant promise already sweeping us toward the next century, I think he would be pleased by the tribute the shining brass implies.
He'd be pleased by this book as well. Students of every age and discipline could learn much by studying his talent, drive and achievement. Thanks to Elizabeth Brayer's fine biography, we can.
George Eastman: A Biography, Elizabeth Brayer. John Hopkins University Press, is now widely available at
bookstores.
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