The History of Kodak — The Company That Invented Digital Cameras and Buried Them

The History of Kodak — The Company That Invented Digital Cameras and Buried Them In December 1975, a 24-year-old Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson carried an 8-pound, hand-built machine into a boardroom, pointed it at a coworker, and pressed a button. Twenty-three seconds later, her face appeared on a TV screen — the first digital photograph ever taken. His own company's response would take 37 years to finish killing it. This video traces Kodak's full rise and fall: from George Eastman, the Rochester bank clerk who built "Kodak" into a household name and a near-total monopoly on film and cameras, to his cryptic six-word suicide note, to Sasson's scavenged-parts digital camera built in a basement lab, to the internal research that predicted digital photography's rise almost to the year — and the executives who read it as a warning to slow down rather than speed up. Along the way: a billion-dollar patent war with Polaroid that ate 15 years and nearly $1 billion, the Ofoto acquisition Kodak had and let slip away before it could become Instagram, and the 2012 bankruptcy that ended with Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Samsung buying Kodak's own digital patents for parts. In this video: 00:00 – The 23-second photo that started the end 01:24 – George Eastman and the birth of Kodak (1878–1888) 02:59 – "A Kodak moment": total market dominance by the 1970s 03:38 – Eastman's six-word note (1932) 04:26 – Steve Sasson builds the first digital camera (1975) 07:06 – "It's cute, but don't tell anyone about it" 08:55 – Kodak's own research predicted digital would win by 2000 10:30 – The billion-dollar Polaroid patent war (1976–1985) 12:41 – Digital as a side project, not a successor 13:23 – Ofoto: the Instagram Kodak already owned 14:12 – Film sales collapse; 47,000 jobs lost (2003–2012) 15:04 – Kodak files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (2012) 15:59 – Big Tech buys Kodak's own digital patents for parts 19:21 – The "disruptive innovation" lesson business schools teach What do you think was Kodak's real mistake — dismissing Sasson's camera in 1975, or the 15 years spent fighting Polaroid instead of building on it? Let me know in the comments. Subscribe to Label Lore for the next brand story.