Kodak Invented the Digital Camera in 1975. Then It Buried It.

In late 1975, a 24-year-old Kodak engineer named Steven Sasson built a toaster-sized device that took 23 seconds to record a single image onto cassette tape. It was the world's first digital camera. When he showed it to his bosses, one of them reportedly said: "That's cute, but don't tell anyone about it." Kodak patented the invention — and buried it, to protect a film business that in 1976 controlled roughly 90% of the American film market. Thirty-seven years later, on January 19, 2012, Eastman Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, listing $6.75 billion in debt against $5.1 billion in assets. This is the full story: George Eastman's invention of the mass-market camera in 1888 and the "you press the button, we do the rest" model that built a company employing 145,300 people at its 1988 peak; Steven Sasson's shelved 1975 breakthrough and the National Medal of Technology he received in 2010, just 14 months before Kodak's bankruptcy; the price war and WTO trade case against rival Fujifilm; the 50,000 jobs cut between 2004 and 2007 as film sales collapsed; the $525 million patent fire-sale to Apple, Google, Microsoft and others that helped Kodak claw its way out of bankruptcy in 2013; and the strange 2020 postscript, when a Trump-era government loan announcement briefly sent Kodak's stock from $2 to over $60 a share — before the $765 million loan quietly fell apart and was never actually paid out. Along the way, we compare Kodak's collapse to Fujifilm, which faced the identical threat and chose to diversify into cosmetics and pharmaceuticals instead — and survived. Subscribe to Bankrupt Ledger for more true stories of how billion-dollar companies collapsed. #BankruptLedger #Kodak #CorporateCollapse