The scene was London’s Savoy Theatre on the evening of October 7, 1893, opening night of a new Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, Utopia, Limited . On stage Nekaya and Kalyba, “very modest and demure” twin girls, were singing a duet:

For English girls are good as gold, Extremely modest (so we’re told)… To diagnose Our modest pose The Kodaks do their best: If evidence you would possess Of what is maiden bashfulness, You only need a button press— And we do all the rest.

Like many of W. S. Gilbert’s lyrics, this one reflected a very contemporary preoccupation—in this instance the Kodak craze, then rampant in Europe as well as America, the home of its originator, George Eastman. Born in upstate New York in 1854, Eastman at the age of twenty was a junior bookkeeper in a bank in Rochester. More significantly, he was a passionate amateur photographer and inventor who would become to the camera what Henry Ford would become to the automobile.

While photography had been practiced in this country since 1839, the bulkiness of the equipment and the complicated nature of the developing process strictly limited its appeal. As a young photographer, Eastman often carried up to seventy pounds of gear on his back; to take a picture he had to emulsify a fragile glass plate, expose it through the lens of his heavy camera, and—working fast before the emulsion dried—develop it under a hood. By 1885 he finally perfected a practicable gelatin-coated paper film that could be manufactured in rolls and packed inside a small camera. Within three years he had developed such a camera: small enough (3½ by 3¾ by 6½ inches) and light enough (twenty-two ounces) to be held in the hand. The operating instructions were extremely simple: 1. Point the camera; 2. Press the button; 3. Turn the key to position the next film frame; and 4. Pull the cord to recock the shutter. Not even a child could miss.

But Eastman knew it would take solid marketing and mass-production techniques to turn his ideas into gold. He named his camera Kodak—a short, catchy word that he coined himself and that was easy to pronounce in any language. He also developed the slogan paraphrased in Gilbert’s lyric: “You press the button, we do the rest.” Soon the Eastman Kodak Company was doing just that. For twenty-five dollars it was turning out a camera complete with leather case and loaded with a one-hundred-exposure roll of film; after the pictures were taken the customer could ship case and camera, with the exposed film still inside, to Rochester, where for an additional ten dollars the factory