A Visit to the Treasure Vaults

...So anyway, to continue my post from Friday: Last Thursday, after seeing the fine A. L. Coburn exhibit at George Eastman Museum (GEM), Geoff's and my day wasn't over. Thanks to my new friend Robyn, we had an introduction to her friend and colleague Todd Gustavson. Todd is the Curator of Technology at the Museum...a.k.a. the camera guy. You might know of Todd from such best-selling camera books as Camera: A History of Photography from Daguerreotype to Digital. After saying hello he kindly took time out of his day and led the way down to the catacombs for a tour behind the scenes.

That might not make you catch your breath, but I knew we were about to see the world's biggest camera closet. GEM has one of the most significant camera collections in the world, with around 16,000 significant pieces, many priceless (or very valuable) and many one-of-a-kind. They range from the Alphonse Giroux whole-plate Daguerreotype camera of 1839, to a Leica O-Series from 1923 in very fine condition (serial number 109), to the second Deardorff ever made (serial number: 2, written in pencil), to the camera payload from the Lunar Orbiter that first mapped the moon, to the "earliest known surviving" DSLR (we'll get to that story). And those are only a few high points. For photo nuts, there are treasures on every shelf. The deeper you delve the more there is to find.

Curator of Technology Todd Gustavson reaches for a "dime bank" on one aisle of the world's largest camera closet

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Todd led us down into a room the size of an airplane hangar filled with shelving from the floor to higher than you could reach. Of course we saw the original Kodak, the box camera that inspired the slogan "You Push the Button, We Do the Rest." And Todd wound it and actually pressed the famous button—and, obligingly, the shutter fired, with a little snick. Later he showed us a whimsical little accessory, a "dime bank," that was marketed with one of those very early Kodaks. It consisted of a metal cylinder a customer could fill with dimes, and it was marked on the side with the names of the cameras you could afford if you had enough dimes to reach the mark! Cool beans. It was to help people save up for a camera purchase.

Three old cameras?

Here's an example of what we're dealing with here. Just three old cameras, right? Left to right: Alfred Stieglitz's camera, a camera from Mathew Brady's portrait gallery, and the camera that took the flag-raising picture at Iwo Jima*.

Celebrities
Two of the fun things I saw: I was walking down one aisle when I spied an old camera with a masking tape label on it. Scrawled on the tape was "Property of Beaumont Newhall." I claim not to be a child (or a fan) of celebrity culture, but that's only because all my celebrities are photo-related. (Well, and snooker players, but let's not go there.) John Travolta has a house on my lake and I couldn't care less, but touching something Beaumont Newhall touched? Wow.

Another was seeing the Hasselblad 1000F, the company's second model—with a Kodak lens. It turns out Victor Hasselblad had the Kodak concession in Sweden, and in his day, Kodak's various optical subsidies still had the world's best lens technologies. (No longer the case, of course. When I asked the famous Kodak lens designer and optical polymath Rudolf Kingslake if he would write some articles on lenses for Photo Techniques, the then-93-year-old Mr. Kingslake told me, "I don't know anything any more."(!)).

Victor Hasselblad wanted Kodak lenses for his new cameras, but soon switched to Zeiss...they were cheaper.

Most of our tour concentrated on digital. Here's an interesting camera—developed by Jim McGarvey's Federal Systems Division (FDS) at Kodak, it's the "earliest known surviving" DSLR in the world. The reason for the tortuous descriptors is that the world's very first DSLR, also developed by FDS, was the so-called E-O, or Electro-Optic, of 1988. That one was a one-of-a-kind that was built for what Jim McGarvey calls "a U.S. government customer." Kodak still isn't allowed to say (I'd think three initials and a reflexive culture of high secrecy—could be one of several). So does the E-O, the world's first DSLR, still exist? Might; might not**. The agency that paid for it might still have it, or might not—but they aren't saying, and you can't ask!

Shown is the Tactical Camera of 1989, the world's, yes, earliest known surviving DSLR. Built with an off-the-shelf Canon New F-1 body. The oblong extruded-aluminum box next to it holds the electronics and the memory. FDS built two of these essentially as salesman's models to show to various government agencies.

The 1.2-megapixel NC2000e of 1994 was the newsroom standard

In fact, Kodak, which wrote most of the history of early digital (and was still causing a sensation with its cameras as late as the 2002 Photokina), had some problems. The first was that, where digital was concerned, they were doing R&D and weren't really thinking in terms of marketing. The first time out of the gate they didn't realize that if a digital SLR said "Nikon" on it up top—because it was built using an ordinary off-the-shelf Nikon body and lenses—the public would naturally give Nikon credit for the camera, even though everything that made it digital came from Kodak.

As you might remember, newsroom purchases drove the first penetration of DSLRs into the marketplace. The NC2000e shown above was the standard newsroom camera in 1994—at $17,500, it was too expensive for anyone else. Because of that name on the prism housing, people assumed that the camera was the result of cooperation between Kodak and Nikon. Not so. The first time Canon or Nikon learned of DSLRs earlier than this was the same time the public did—when they came to market. That changed in 1994 when Kodak entered into a cooperative agreement with Canon—they never had a similar agreement with Nikon. [Note: An earlier version of this post had this backwards. Sorry for the error. —Mike the Ed.]

Second, although it was a manufacturing company possessing considerable expertise, Kodak didn't make a pro SLR body.

A third problem, and the one that's kinda touchy now, was that Kodak had nourished a culture so protective of the sanctity of its film business that, in the late '80s, the pre-production, pre-DSC prototypes weren't even called "cameras." They were termed "imaging accessories." Cameras used film.

The common perception is that Kodak was late to adjust to digital. Not the case. Actually, more often it was the opposite: it was too early with too many of its developments—products were made before the demand for them had developed. It happened again and again—too far ahead of the curve, not too far behind it. Just as bad, really, for business success, but quite different from the common assumption.

The biggest problem, though, was in the business model that George Eastman established starting in 1888. Cameras weren't where the money was; it was in film. The profitability of film just couldn't be approached by selling digital cameras, sensors, or reusable media. The infrastructure of Kodak Park had been developed at great cost to manufacture film efficiently—and it would have been hugely difficult to turn on a dime to manufacture anything else. As Todd remarked, "'Making the elephant dance' would not be an easy task."

Here's another interesting artifact. Many of you will remember the clamoring for "digital film" in the middle 2000s—a module that you could pop into a film body to instantly convert it to a digital camera. Here it is, in a prototype from around 2000. (The thing on the right is not a camera, just a case—if you think about it for a second, you'll realize that the distance between the cassette well and the film gate is non-standard, so a physically different design would have to be made to fit every different camera.) The product existed, and worked. But the project never got capital funding to get it to market.

A certain sadness
Although George Eastman Museum is not a corporate arm of Kodak—it's a separate entity, independently funded, and doing well—there is a sense of both trauma and tragedy that lingers in the air here. Kodak was a proud American achievement—a brand of huge prestige and a vastly profitable company that was a blue-chip success for well over a century, something few businesses of any kind ever achieve. (Imagine Apple still being around 88 years from now and you'll get a sense of this. Kodak is 15 years older than Ford Motor Company.) It long outlived its founder, George Eastman. (Depressed by severe chronic pain from a degenerative condition and with no hope of getting better, Eastman took his own life in 1932.) That's something not many companies based on innovations and ideas achieve either. It not very long ago employed 60,000 people in Rochester, spanning generations.

Todd emphasized to us that Kodak was well prepared for the end of film—it had the start point and the end point accurately predicted on the graph. It just expected the decline in between to be gradual. It wasn't. It was much more abrupt—things went along better than expected for a while, and then the graph line fell off a cliff. (To give you an idea, in a recent dpreview interview, Toru Takahashi of Fujifilm said that demand for its film products today is less than 1% of what it was in 2000.) Kodak was prepared to adapt. Just not that fast.

The bigger the company, the more in danger it is from disruption. The jumble of severe disruption resulting from the nosedive of the demand for film and the carnage it caused within Kodak was harsh and shocking to those whose lives were entwined with the company and its work, and for the city it helped to both build and define. From a distance it's just the Darwinism of big business; from up close there are human lives and emotions deeply involved. Rochesterians had to witness the proud old "Great Yellow Father" go down like a stricken ocean liner hit by a torpedo.

The last Kodak pro digital camera was the Professional DCS Pro SLR/c of 2004, built by Sigma with a Canon mount. Fewer than 2,000 people work for Kodak today, and the majority of the old Kodak Park is rented out to other tenants. Kodak's Professional Camera Division never turned a profit.

Plus-X! I shot thousands of rolls of that. I could play
Plus-X like Perlman plays the fiddle, once upon a time.

Curiously, a little yellow film box, modest as can be, embodies one of the great consumer products of all time, the result of decades of intensive scientific research, tremendous manufacturing know-how, matchless expertise in quality control, and tens of billions of dollars of R&D—yet the film in the box cost less than the packaging around it! The profit margin from film sales was ungodly high, decade after decade. In digital, by contrast, everywhere Kodak looked it had to ask, "...but where will the money come from?"

So what does Todd Gustavson himself shoot with? None of the cameras in the collection. "That would be a conflict of interest," he says softly. He showed us his own black Nikon Dƒ, saying, sardonically, "I'm one of the two guys who bought one of these."*** He prefers the AIS Micro-Nikkor 55mm ƒ/2.8 (which you can still buy new! I did not know that), a lens John Loengard of LIFE magazine fame also favors.

I hope this won't be TOP's last visit to the treasure vaults. There's a lot down there, really.

Mike

[Note: This article has been revised several times since first published. —Mike the Ed.]

Todd Gustavson, whose latest book is Curious Cameras: 183 Cool Cameras from the Strange to the Spectacular (a serious book, despite its flip and kid-friendly cover and title—I admit I thought it was a book for children when I first saw it online) was extremely gracious to take so much time out of his day to give us all a peek into the underground grotto of cameraphile delights. It was a wonderful tour—and the vast store of knowledge in Todd's head is an appropriate counterpart to the physical collection. Many thanks to Robyn, to all the kind, friendly people at George Eastman Museum, and especially Todd. Indirect thanks as well to Jim McGarvey for his PDF "The DCS Story."

*Probably. Todd thinks so, but the provenance isn't ironclad from a strict scholarly point of view.

**Could have been sold as government surplus, even...to some scrounger who didn't know what it was. Ew. Let's not go there either.

***Of course he exaggerates. At least 29 guys bought Dƒ's. And don't think I haven't been tempted.

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Hugh Smith: "What a wonderful article, Mike. When I started in photography, working in a camera shop, we genuflected 3X daily to Rochester. When the Kodak sales rep visited the store, we all dropped our collective jaws just to be near the guy. It was the best of times and the worst of times as we all know now. I never made the 'pilgrimage' to Rochester and George Eastman House and this article is just awesome. Thank you."

Ctein: "Curiously, I just acquired Camera: A History of Photography from Daguerreotype to Digital in December when I encountered it on the bargain table at Barnes & Noble. I picked it up expecting a cheapo reference book, at an appropriately cheapo price, flipped through it, and daaaayum, it was really good! Well worth acquiring at any price.

"Overall, Todd and I are in agreement about Kodak's relationship to and history with digital. This, of course, means we're both right. The point about Kodak being too far ahead of the curve is a valuable lesson. There are multiple examples of that. PhotoCD is one. It would have been a much bigger success if it had been released 2–3 years later. Nobody had anything remotely close to it coming down the pike, and when it was released it was simply too immature and the cost/performance ratio was too unfavorable. The home players needed about three times the performance to be acceptable, which was impossible at the time without the price being unacceptable. And Kodak's representatives flat-out lied to photography labs about what it would cost them (and what they'd have to charge) to run PhotoCD services, by about a factor of three.

"In addition, some of the standards around PhotoCD and its color management were still in flux, so early discs had real compatibility problems with later software.

"But the concept and the overall technical execution? Excellent! Just too early.

"I bet hardly anyone reading this remembers the Kodak Premier System. It was a dedicated digital darkroom for photography labs that came out in the early '90s.  It was brilliant, and it was a joy to use. Imagine if Photoshop actually worked the way a darkroom photographer would expect it to work! A custom printer (I mean the human kind) could use Premier with half an hour's training and become proficient on it in a day. It was that much like working in a dark room…except you worked in the light, seated at a console, with a big screen in front of you. The results looked like the way you would expect a photograph to look if you were manipulating it in the darkroom—color correction, dodging and burning-in, and more sophisticated controls produced results that looked 'photographic' not 'Photoshopped.'

"There was just one problem. It was 2–3 years too early. To make the system run well and fast, it needed custom hardware and code needed to be written to intimately mate with the computer. Unfortunately, it all made the system so expensive that it was impossible for a lab to ever amortize the purchase cost.

"For several years after Premier stopped shipping, I bugged the techies at Kodak to release the software as a standalone package, because it would have eaten Photoshop's lunch. That's how I found out about the code. They couldn't, not without rewriting it from the ground up. It was very customized. A shame.

"Kodak really did understand all this stuff before almost anybody else. Probably too far before anybody else.

"And, yeah, the very sudden collapse of the film business in less than two years in the mid-'Naughties'  caught everyone by surprise, and it totally clobbered Kodak's long-term plans."

gary bliss: "I think that you have the economics of Kodak about right: Fuji's arrival in the '70sand '80s cut their margins close to half but they were still un-gawdly high; easily 40+% of sales, net. But these are margins that, short of pharma or cosmetics, are simply not generally available in the economy. So yes, how would any Kodak manager succeed by facilitating users, broadly speaking, to get off that horse?

"But there is another, and somewhat more subtle, institutional implication that the margins had. It is something that you may recognize from back-in-the-day. The culmulative effect of decades of sky high margins was the creation of a remarkably ossified and remote Kodak middle-management infrastructure, some of it 'R&D' (that did little for the bottom line) and some 'marketing' that was tone deaf to consumers' needs (witness APS).  Kodak's remoteness was a open secret in the industry, to be highlighted every five years or so with yet-another Kodak 'openness' initiative.

"I am in the defense sector and we were, frankly, free riders on Kodak's research. We got, for example, adaptive optics decades early due to that and, frankly, didn't pay much for it; gosh darn it was useful for reading license plates on the tundra...."

Frank P: "I did some of the ads and collateral for Kodak's digital and film products through the '90s, also lots of ancillary involvement with other brands. One of Kodak's most important contributions was to envision and develop our current workflow using raw files and conversion software, along with reliable color profiling. As well as the basis for inkjet printing. Imagine digital photography left in the hands of Canikon and Sony...nothing but JPEGs and Microsoft Power Point hyper-saturated colors."

Peter: "I don't know anything about this place, but why the hell is all that stuff not on display for the public, rather than be locked in a cellar?"

Mike replies: It's often on display. Large collections like this are resources that are drawn on for exhibits, as needed. Same as with collections of art. Most art museums have only a small fraction of their holdings on display at any given time. The rest is in storage. When a curator gets an idea for a show, they might draw from their museum's own collection, and they might pull in other pieces on loan from other museums' collections.

Todd has curated 10 museum shows from the GEM camera collection; plus, selected items are on rotating permanent display; plus, selected items are brought out to augment specific shows. Plus, his four books are ongoing "virtual displays" with pictures and writeups of many of the items.

When we visited, there were a number of "Pre-Kodak" items (i.e., before 1888) out on a table, being gathered together for a new permanent exhibit, one that will give people an idea of what photography was all about before George Eastman came along. Todd mentioned that his next task was to take all the stuff he'd gathered together up to the room where it would be shown to see how it all fits in the cases, to figure out what there's room to show.

kevin willoughby: "Re '...the camera payload from the Lunar Orbiter that first mapped the moon...' Can you double-check this? Perhaps it was a prototype or a spare...to the best of my knowledge, every Lunar Orbiter that actually orbited the Moon was deliberately crashed into the Moon. The only man-made lunar artifact recovered from the moon was the camera of Surveyor 3."

Todd Gustavson replies: I wrote about this in all three books as it’s such a special piece. The pictures/descriptions vary: the first Camera book has a two-page spread showing Lunar Orbiter payload, a couple detail images of it, a LO image of Kepler crater on the moon taken by LO Feb. 1967, an image of the complete satellite as it would have looked in Lunar orbit, and an image of the Kodak technicians working on it; 500 Cameras has an additional piece written by Pete Schultz, a physicist from Brown University who also does some work for NASA; and Curious Cameras has an image of the Lunar Orbiter payload and the Earth from the near moon orbit.

[Note: Profits from the linked books go to the George Eastman Museum. —Mike the Ed.]

Tom Kwas (partial comment): "I ran across a few sites on-line where people were saying that they knew somebody with both the Ektar 80mm for Hasselblad, and the Zeiss 80mm, and the Ektar blew the Zeiss out of the water...."

Michael Perini: "Mike, thanks for this, all of it, but especially the Kodak story. Few companies ever get as good at what they do as Kodak was, and fewer still for as long. They certainly made some critical mistakes, but I'm not sure anyone could have turned that battleship fast enough. Film was just too profitable. I still have a collection of Commercial, and Wide Field Ektars, and Deardorffs on which to mount them. They were just wonderful. Thank you again. +1 for Todd's first book; I haven't seen the second one."

Mark Sampson: "Thanks for the intelligent analysis about Kodak's being just too far ahead of the curve. We were indeed; I was there, and using a software suite called 'KIEWS' in the early '90s that pre-dated Photoshop...it ran on a Sun SparcStation II computer since no PC/Mac at that time was powerful enough to handle it. I took the original documentary photos of Mr. McGarvey's 'Tactical Camera' and the other DSLR prototypes; they can be seen on his site. And yes, I shot them on 4x5 color negative film, using a Kodak Commercial Ektar lens."

Comments

[Chuck Albertson]

B&H sells quite a few of the manual-focus Nikon AIS lenses, which are still manufactured by Nikon. They're solid, unlike a lot of the AF offerings.

[Crabby Umbo]

I would have bought a Nikon Df immediately, if they had cared enough to make it with an actually focusing screen. Just another case of "almost done right".

[Tom Kwas]

You know, I knew a guy with an old focal plane shutter Hasselblad and Kodak Ektar lenses, and he said the lenses were actually great. Funny that making lenses wouldn't have been something Kodak could have developed similar to the way Zeiss does today. A lot of those Kodak Commerical Ektars for view cameras were never really surpassed for sharpness, just contrast due to multi-coating and more accurate shutters.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Well that was fun, eh?! Yes I know of Todd Gustavson well, having two of his books on my ready-reference shelf.

If you want to explore the GEH further from the comfort of your computer (or net-connected tv) you should subscribe to The George Eastman House channel on YouTube. Lots and lots of wonderful videos of technical/historic topics as well as coverage of some of their lectures. If you're into the history of photography it's one of the go-to spots. (Warning: don't click that link unless you really have time to spare.)

[Kaemu]

Having started my career at Bell Labs, I know exactly how the Kodak folks must have felt. When I joined, after it was spun off from AT&T, it had 100,000 employees and $30B in sales. It's research labs collected Nobel prizes, its products, from DSPs, Cables, Class 5 switches to voice messaging systems where pretty much the best in the business... It is now a shadow of its former self. To survive it had to merge with it's rival Alcatel (another fallen giant) and later with Nokia Systems. Nortel, the rival from Canada, could not make it and went through liquidation.

But the Nokia Mobile Phones story is probably sadder. My impression is that Nokia's success was a big part of Finland's self image. They were taking the world by storm, it seemed the sky was the limit but within a few short years it all came crashing down. The company is owned by Microsoft. Which must doubly hurt because Nokia's leadership had the right vision. They saw people using PCs less and personal devices more, which could only that their triumph was assured and the Redmond firm doomed...

[Mark Layne]

An interesting article. Since I also bought a Nikon Df there at least 3.
My Hasselblad 1600F works as does the 1000F and my Kodak DCSProC
Really does give Kodachrome colours

[Herb Cunningham]

Really good stuff Mike, Makes me wish I still had some of my ancient stuff with the air packard shutter etc., not to mention the Petzval and the Dagor lenses

[mike plews]

We bought our son a Kodak DC215 when he was in middle school. It was a battery eating .7MP (NOT 7mp, .7mp) marvel.
It is on the shelf at home so I guess we finally have a museum quality piece in the family.
It must have been an OK camera though. Our son will be getting his MFA in photography this May. However the DC215 has been replaced by a D7100.

[David A. Goldfarb]

I don't know if they are still trading on eBay, but it can be interesting to dive into their virtual dumpster--usually containing items donated to the museum of which they have one or more better copies. I bought a defunct Kodak Medalist II from the Museum formerly known as George Eastman House several years ago and adapted the legendary 100mm f:3.5 Ektar (a Heliar type) to Canon FD mount, and more recently to Canon EF mount using the Medalist's focusing helical.

[Aaron Bredon]

I believe the Minolta SB-70s and SB90s backs for the Minolta 7000 and 9000 SLRs predate the Kodak DSLRs. The Minolta backs were shown at Photokina in 1986, and were supposedly released in 1987. They recorded 640x480 pixel images on 2 inch floppy discs.

[Those were still video cameras, which did predate digital cameras. The first one of those I used was the Canon Xapshot in 1988. --Mike]

[Ken James]

That was a fun post, thanks Mike.

[Dave I]

Thank you for that trip through (part of) the GEM. Great stuff, especially the "digital film" adapter. The only thing missing was a box of Tech Pan in the photo of the old film.

Thanks also to Kenneth Tanaka for the reminder of the GEH channel on YouTube.

[Doug Thacker]

Thanks for the trip into the sanctom sanctorum. I find it endlessly fascinating how big, industry-dominating companies like Kodak innovate themselves straight out of existence. As I'm sure you and most of your readers are aware, the first digital camera was developed at Kodak in 1975 (the year I graduated high school) by an engineer named Steven Sasson. Here it is:

(If you look closely you can see a cassette tape attached - this was the best means they had at the time for recording the data.)

Despite having developed the technology, Kodak's research labs were mostly siloed off from its money making business - which, as you point out, was centered around film - and so they had no idea how to "monetize" the developments of their own research. (I recall reading an interview with the CEO of Kodak, whose name I forget, given in about 2002, wherein he said that the company projected a fifteen to twenty year viability for the film business on account of the "Third World", where the minilab trade was just starting to boom. This CEO, whoever he was, reasoned that developing countries would have to go through several years of film usage before adopting digital. As it turned out, however, the developing counties largely skipped film and went straight to digital - just as they skipped landline telecoms infrastructure and went straight to cellular.)

Recently I discovered this.

It's the first digital photograph, a 1-bit image recorded in January or February of 1957 (one or two months after my birth - the little bugger in the image could have been me) by Russell A. Kirsch for the U.S. National Bureau of Standards during his development of the first digital scanner. (This whole digital thing, it turns out, is of and by the generation preceding mine, and yours, and, I'm guessing, that of most of TOP's readers.)

For a few years I worked for AT&T. During that time I learned that the first municipal cellular telephone system was built in Washington, DC, for use by Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. The mobile phone in his presidential limousine was approximately the size of a loaf of bread. AT&T owned the patents to cellular phone towers (and basically all cellular technology) but because they couldn't figure out how to monetize the technology they sold it off - only to be laid low by it a short time later - just like Kodak.

[MikeR]

Lots of interesting stuff in this post, but what caught my eye was, "John Travolta has a house on my lake and I couldn't care less..."

So, doing some exploring on the omniscient Web, I found this, for your edification and amusement:
http://www.fingerlakes.com/news/john-travolta-keuka-lake

[Sarge]

Slightly off-topic...

Thorstein Veblen, better known to TOP readers for his work on conspicuous consumption ("Veblen goods"), was also an early scholar on disruptive innovation. For a geeky but accessible retrospective on Veblen's thoughts regarding what leads to the demise of technology giants (like Kodak, IBM, Nokia), read Thorstein Veblen: Economics for an Age of Crisis (Anthem Other Canon Economics) available at amazon. There's no e-book version but it's also accessible as a google book.

The Norwegian-American scholar and author wrote when economics was a social science ("political economy/philosophy") before physics envy transformed the discipline into its highly-mathematized form today. Marxists consider Veblen as one of them but he was more than that.

[Doug C]

I wish I had know how to operate the shutter on an original Kodak when a friend brought me an odd old box camera. They are completely unmarked and unless you suspect, you will have no idea what the darn thing is.

I looked it over, measured it (the only way you can figure out why the darn thing is) looked it in my collector's guide (McKeown I guess) and then just called up McKeown, very nice gentleman. He guided me me as to how my friend could sell it for a reasonable price (something like $2,000 twenty five years ago) and get it into the hands of a real collector (this was very important to McKeown, preservation) He sounded excited that another one had been found.

But I never clicked the shutter, I didn't know how. Nothing is very obvious on those cameras. Very simple to operate I guess. The operator's manual must have been only a few lines on a single page.

But the shutter is such an interesting thing, a rolling cylinder isn't it? Very nicely machined, nothing like the stamped out parts of the later cheap snap-shot cameras, this was obviously simple and expensive at the same time, the iPhone of it's time.

I first noticed that there was no obvious way to open it. It took round images a little over two inches, and the magazine was very large, so it took a whole lot of them, hmmmmm........ What is this?

[Alan Carmody]

This is a wonderful article, Mike. Definitely in the TOP top 10.Thank you very much for sharing.

B&H has eleven distinct manual focus Nikon AIS lenses listed. They are a bargain in 2016 dollars, and will last two lifetimes. We don't need no steenkin' VR and AFS with a good focusing screen :)

I apologize, I don't know how to make the below a TOP sponsored B&H link.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?atclk=Features_Manual+Focus+Only&ci=274&N=4288584247+4291315846+4108103537+4109120024

[Eliott James]

A great article. Thanks.

[ctein]

Dear Doug,

"...they had no idea how to "monetize" the developments of their own research..."

That is simply not true. Sometimes they did not succeed, but they were a product-oriented company and that applied as much to the digital research as much as the film. Like all very large companies, though, they had far more interesting ideas and inventions than the wherewithal to develop them.

Perhaps that's why this untruth gets perpetuated. People don't realize how many good ideas a big company can come up with. Only a fraction can be turned into products.

Or maybe it's just that people hate the idea that you can be smart and knowledgeable and still fail. 'Cause that would mean the universe wasn't a fair place, y'know, and we'd all be shocked.

As for failing to monetize... until the ill-advised DCS14n, Kodak OWNED the high end digital camera market. Just one of many examples I could cite.

Kodak made mistakes. Ultimately, Kodak failed. But this variant of the "they didn't have a clue" trope is deeply wrong.

~~~~

Dear Peter,

Pretty much every museum in the world has a far, far bigger collection than they have room to display. GEH is not different. Believe me, the stuff on exhibit is pretty damn cool.

pax / Ctein

[Frank P]

I did some of the ads and collateral for Kodak's digital and film products through the 90s, also lots of ancillary involvement with other brands.

One of Kodak's most important contributions was to envision and develop our current workflow using raw files and conversion software, along with reliable color profiling. As well as the basis for inkjet printing.

Imagine digital photography left in the hands of Canikon and Sony... nothing but JPGs and Microsoft Power Point hyper saturated colors.

[Ernest Zarate]

Mike, your posts never fail to be worth the read. Many are stimulating, a few are frustrating, now and then head scratching - but yours is a blog I always look forward to clicking on (and supporting). This post was truly fun to read, to view the photos, and to imagine myself wandering that amazing collection with you! Also, just a touch of melancholia thinking back on the decades of film use I was lucky enough to experience before The Change. Thank you and I look forward to Part II of this.

[Tom Kwas]

...as an "add-on" to my Ektar post above, I ran across a few sites on-line where people were saying that they knew somebody with both the Ektar 80mm for Hasselblad, and the Zeiss 80mm, and the Ektar blew the Zeiss out of the water...might have something to do with the Ektar having more elements than the Zeiss...

[Steve Jacob]

Kodak's management would have done well to consult a risk management expert versed in catastrophe theory.

Revolutions seldom lead to a 'gradual decline', especially in technology.

[Jon Schick]

Great lunchtime read at work, thanks Mike. I'd love to visit that treasure trove if I ever had the opportunity. Interesting to hear that I'm one of the 29 people with a Nikon df, a recent acquisition. But then I'm one of about 20 still using the Olympus E-1 too.....which is partly wonderful because it came complete with that lovely Kodak sensor and a look and colour palette that I've never seen the like of from any other digital camera.

[Jack Foley]

Your fascination, and obvious delight in getting "the inside story" from a learned and devoted curator come through very clearly in this post. Thanks for sharing your safari with us.

[Don Daso]

Visited GEH in 1974 while in film grad school. The history of movie cameras, motion picture film, the standards in processing & printing it were a revelation then. Everything you'd ever read about or heard about was right there, in the collection!

[Robert Billings]

Many thanks Mike for a very interesting article. In the credits of the new Star Wars film at the very end is the Kodak logo, in their famous yellow. All other credits were in a uniform blue color. Made me feel good to see that!

[Eamon Hickey]

[Begging forgiveness for the solipsistic comment:] In the years when I wrote feature stories for Rob Galbraith's web site, one of my favorite pieces to report and write was a story I did on the NC2000 and some of the photojournalists who began using it in 1994. I've done a few pieces on news photographers, and I always enjoy their salty take on the world and their work. As a bonus, this story also pleased my inner historian.

I've probably mentioned it in earlier comments, but for anyone interested, it's still available here:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/multi_page3e5f.html?cid=7-6463-7191

[John Robison]

Early 70's, we all shot Tri-X, I used Diafine and of course Nikor tanks. (were there any other SS tanks and reels?) Could walk into Altman's on Wabash in Chicago and get 100ft. of Tri-X, a box of 10 'snap caps' film cartridges and change back from a $10 bill. My how times have changed. Ilford is the new king of the hill (at least in B&W film and darkroom support, and for the time being). Even they had to buy a metal film cartridge supplier to ensure a reliable supply of that necessary item.

[Dennis]

I remember being fascinated by the lunar orbiter camera at the museum. It was a self-contained camera, wet processor, and scanner package that transmitted a low-bit image back to Earth. Those photo boys from the '50's were pretty creative!

[Brian Reynolds]

For another look at this collection, Chris Marquardt also recently visited the camera collection at the George Eastman Museum. His "Tips from the Top Floor" podcast episode 704 includes an audio discussion of his visit. The page for that episode also has links to a one hour video tour he put up on YouTube. His other videos from that day highlight the Lunar Orbiter camera, the first Kodak slide carousel, and exhibits at the museum.

[Moose]

"Most art museums have only a small fraction of their holdings on display at any given time. The rest is in storage."

There's a relatively recent change/spin on this. In the American collection at the Brooklyn Museum, one may go through a pair of tall, glass doors into a cool, dimly lit area where the much more of the collection is visible in dim light, cool air and behind glass.

This is called Visible Storage, and has, I discovered, been being added at various museums for several years.

[Robert Harshman]

really a nice read, great comments. Thanks Mike

[Michael Bearman]

A lovely post, Mike. I usually grizzle about companies being run by bean counters. But what happened to Kodak is what happens if a company is run by engineers. A pity.

[Earl Dunbar]

Thank you, Mike. Thank you

I moved to Rochester in the Fall of 1993, just before things were starting to implode. My mother-in-law and her husband (my wife's step-father) were Kodakers. My step-father-in-law remembers one of the first retail camera shops in Saranac Lake, where he was born, that timed film development with a pendulum marked by differing marks on the wall behind.

My girl friend when I moved here (that was WHY I made the move) worked on contract for Kodak, helping to develop the UI for Photo CD.

The company I now work for has a location in Building 9 at what was known as "Elmgrove". It's not infrequent that I walk into the facility and think about the history, the people who worked there yet I do not know all their stories. I regularly drive through Kodak Park on my way to work. The decline haunts me, even though I have far less attachment than those who, like my wife, were born, raised and have lived their entire lives here.

The recurring theme among ex-Kodakers is that, along with missing the timeline of the decline of film, the core issue was Kodak's corporate/management culture. To advance you needed to agree and emulate. Outside thinking got you nowhere except maybe gone.

[Matt Miller]

The 100/3.5 Ektar on the Kodak Medalist cameras is a real gem. Gosh I miss film!

[Nigel]

Dennis..."I remember being fascinated by the lunar orbiter camera at the museum. It was a self-contained camera, wet processor, and scanner package that transmitted a low-bit image back to Earth..."

I found that bit equally interesting and did a bit of noodling around. The developing process wasn't wet, though, and the transmission system was entirely analogue:

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/TM-3487/ch3-7.htm
[67] The basic system which Eastman Kodak would provide Boeing had been in existence since mid-1960,when Kodak had developed it for military applications. For Boeing's use it had been reduced in size and weight to fit within the Agena weight restrictions. The mechanics of the system were as follows: Film from a supply reel passed through a focal plane optical imaging system, and controlled exposures were made. Once past the shutter, the film underwent a semi-dry chemical developing process and then entered a storage chamber. From here it could be extracted upon command from the ground for scanning by a flying-spot scanner and then passed on to a take-up reel.
The line-scanning device consisted of a cathode-ray tube with a rotating anode having a high-intensity spot of light. The scanner optics of the moving lens system reduced by 22 times this point of light, focused it on the film transparencies and scanned them. A photomultiplier then converted the light passing from the scanner through [68] the film into an electrical signal whose strength would vary with the density of the emulsion layer of the film. This signal would then be transmitted to a receiving station on Earth and reconstructed. The Eastman Kodak Company would upgrade the system for the demands of the Boeing orbiter and its mission.

A significant part of the improvement in the system was the introduction of the Kodak Bimat process, which eliminated the necessity to use "wet" chemicals on the film. Instead, a film-like processing material was briefly laminated to the exposed film to develop and fix the negative image and, if the need existed, to produce a positive image. In the case of the Boeing orbiter this 3.8 second step was not used, and only negatives were made. Once the film had been developed and fixed, the Bimat material separated from the film and wound onto a storage spool....

[Nigel]

Reminded me of this fascinating article about one of the lenses used on the earlier and rather less successful Ranger program (whose camera package was put together by RCA not Kodak):
http://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2015/06/the-space-lens-mystery-screw

[Dale]

I had the great pleasure of providing sound systems for the Kodak Center of Creative Imaging in Camden Maine in 1991. It was a joint Apple and Kodak facility with Adobe participation. I also provided systems for the opening events and got to shake hands with Douglas Kirkland, Herbert Keppler and others. A very impressive place ahead of its time and at the wrong time as Kodak was starting its financial woes and closed it a couple years later

[Dan Khong]

It seems the latest 007 movie and Star Wars were shot on real film.

Did they use Kodak or Fuji film?

[Dillan K]

That photo, 'three old cameras,' just blows me away. Just sitting on a shelf. What a place!