The Rise and Fall of Kodak: The Company That Invented the Digital Camera

The company that invented the digital camera went bankrupt because of it. In 1975 a Kodak engineer built the world's first self-contained digital camera. Kodak's fortune rested on cheap cameras and very high-margin film, and it spent the next three decades protecting that film business from the invention in its own lab. This is how George Eastman's yellow-box empire rose, ruled Rochester, and ended in a Chapter 11 filing in 2012. In this episode: A bank clerk's kitchen experiments and the 1888 camera that made photography a habit The $1 Brownie and the razor-and-blades film machine Kodachrome, the Instamatic, and Rochester's "Great Yellow Father" Steven Sasson's 8-pound digital camera, and why it never became a product The 1981 warning, the Fuji challenge, and the Polaroid defeat EasyShare, camera phones, the 2012 bankruptcy and the $525 million patent sale Kodak today, and the film revival nobody expected Subscribe to Mainstreet Memories for more stories of the American brands that built our towns and then vanished. #Kodak #BusinessHistory #RiseAndFall #Rochester #Kodachrome #DigitalCamera #AmericanHistory #MainstreetMemories