It was with profound sadness that I read of Kodak's filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, especially since the story was buried by SOPA. Regardless of the company that emerges from the process, Kodak as you and I knew it is gone.
There was a time when the only American logo more prevalent than Kodak in even the most out-of-the-way locales around the world was Coca-Cola, and in most tourist stops, not even.
But it is a cruel capitalist fact of life that new technologies create new companies that obviate and eliminate old companies. The rise of both digital photography and digital film conspired to destroy Kodak's hegemony over the camera and film industries it created.
The irony is that Kodak was doomed by a technology it also invented – the digital camera (see "Who Invented the Digital Camera?").
America's greatest inventor/entrepreneur?
What makes Kodak's demise additionally poignant is its uniqueness among America's tech giants.
Steve Jobs' obit writers compared him to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. But rising above all three seminal American innovation businessmen is George Eastman, arguably America's most successful inventor/entrepreneur, and his company the most dominant in its field for the longest period of time. (Edison had little to do with the running of General Electric, and Alexander Graham Bell had no hand in the founding or running in the companies that still bear his name.)
The photo at the upper left is of my grandmother, my father's mother, Pauline, captured sometime during the 19-teens with the first Kodak Brownie, a $1 camera introduced in 1900. She was a cutie, wasn't she?
Anyway, before Eastman invented roll film (which he provided to Edison and W.K.L. Dickson to make motion pictures possible) and then the handheld camera, photography required glass plates, expensive heavy equipment, time and patience, and trained expertise.
This leap from bulky and clunky glass plate photography to the Brownie seemingly overnight would be like someone today inventing a cheap car that could travel into space on a tankful of gas.
Our most precious possessions
But my family wouldn't have this photo of my teenaged grandmother – and your family wouldn't have boxes and photo albums and Super 8 movies filled with similar memories – without Kodak.
It can be argued the telegraph, the telephone, automobiles, radio, television, computers and cell phones all had more significant societal impact than the camera.
But photography is easily the most personal of all our technologies. We swap out our cars, TVs, computers and cell phones regularly and without much fuss. We even swapped out Kodak and Polaroid cameras.
But you can't swap out the memories captured by these cameras. When disaster looms, our first instinct is to save that which is irreplaceable – our lives, and our photo memories.
These memories even have a name – Kodak moments.
And Kodak was responsible. And now, it's gone.
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Here's an ironic addendum to the SOPA stories of the last couple of days. SOPA's sponsor, Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Tex), apparently was in violation of his own law. As a background for his Web site, he used a copyrighted photo from one DJ Schulte – without permission or attribution. Read the whole story here.