Kodak: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 21:18, 18 January 2025

Eastman Kodak is US company founded in 1881 that popularized photography and dominated the photographic film market.

The Eastman Kodak Company ("Kodak") was founded in 1881 by George Eastman and Henry Strong as the Eastman Dry Plate Company. It was renamed Eastman Kodak in 1892. Their inexpensive cameras popularized photography, but Kodak concentrated on the supply of film and film processing and expanded internationally. In 1912, Kodak established the Kodak Research Laboratories with Kenneth Mees as founding director.

This article is limited to Kodak's direct contributions to documentation and information retrieval services.

Contributions

Kodak supplies constituted an important part of the infrastructure for administrative, commercial and social activities in all fields.

For documentation the use of "wet" photographic images was of the greatest importance document copying until the rise of xerography and digital imaging. In particular sensitized paper was needed in the early twentieth century for rapid and widespread adoption of photostat document copying, and, especially from the mid-1930s to the 1960s for microfilming.

Minicard

The early microfilm rapid selectors of Emanuel Goldberg and Vannevar Bush used photoelectric sensing to search for microfilmed images on long rolls of microfilm. This required serial search of one or more rolls and then rewinding the rolls. This did not scale well. So attempts were made to approximate random search directly to any given document by using short strips ("chips") of microfilm in a a two-step process. First, an index would point to a particular chip on a rod, in a bin, or on the periphery of a wheel; then the right location on the chip would be found in order to display the desired document. However, scaling this design for very large collections as needed by intelligence agencies was difficult and very expensive because it required great precision at very high speed. IBM developed such a system, named Walnut. Kodak and ITEK developed the Minicard system.

John W. Kuipers was director of the Minicard project. Six machines were said to have been delivered, all to US Federal government agencies. Their cost was very high. Improvements in digital computing and digital storage led to their replacement.

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-'''Eastman Kodak''' is US company founded in 1881 that popularized photography and dominated the photographic film supplies market.
+'''Eastman Kodak''' is US company founded in 1881 that popularized photography and dominated the photographic film market.
-For more on Eastman Kodak see "Kodak" ''Wikipedia'' [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak]
+The '''Eastman Kodak Company''' ("Kodak") was founded in 1881 by George Eastman and Henry Strong as the Eastman Dry Plate Company. It was renamed Eastman Kodak in 1892. Their inexpensive cameras popularized photography, but Kodak concentrated on the supply of film and film processing and expanded internationally. In 1912, Kodak established the Kodak Research Laboratories with Kenneth Mees as founding director.
-[[John W. Kuipers]]
+This article is limited to Kodak's direct contributions to documentation and information retrieval services.
-On January 1, 1881, Eastman and Strong formed a partnership called the Eastman Dry Plate Company.  In 1883, Eastman startled the trade with the announcement of film in rolls, with the roll holder adaptable to nearly every plate camera on the market.  With the KODAK camera in 1888, he put down the foundation for making photography available to everyone.  1886 - George Eastman became one of the first American industrialists to employ a full-time research scientist to aid in the commercialization of a flexible, transparent film base.  1889 - The first commercial transparent roll film, perfected by Eastman and his research chemist, was put on the market.  The availability of this flexible film made possible the development of Thomas Edison's motion picture camera in 1891.  A new corporation - The Eastman Company - was formed, taking over the assets of the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company.  1892 - The company became Eastman Kodak Company of New York.  1895 - The Pocket KODAK Camera was announced.  1901 - Eastman Kodak Company of New Jersey, the present parent company, was formed.
-<p>  1902 - The KODAK Developing Machine simplified the processing of roll film and made it possible to develop film without a darkroom.  1912 - DR. C.E. Kenneth Mees, a British scientist, was hired by George Eastman to organize and head a research laboratory in Rochester, one of the first industrial research centers in the U.S.  1917 - Kodak developed aerial cameras and trained aerial photographers for the U.S. Signal Corps during World War I.  Eastman also offered the U.S. Navy supplies of cellulose acetate for coating airplane wings and producing unbreakable lenses for gas masks.  1941 - Kodak marketed the versatile KODAK EKTRA Camera, which had a shutter-speed range from 1/1000 to 1 second.  Airgraph, or &quot;V-Mail,&quot; was developed by Kodak as a system for microfilming letters to conserve shipping space during World War II.  Frank Lovejoy was elected chairman of the board and Thomas J. Hargrave, previously head of the company's legal department became president.  1942 - KODACOLOR Film for prints, the world's first true color negative film, was announced.  Kodak's Rochester plants were awarded the Army-Navy &quot;E&quot; for high achievement in the production of equipment and films for the war effort.  (All of the above information was taken from the Eastman Kodak homepage  http://www.kodak.com/ and then did a search for &quot;history)
-This article is limited to Kodak's direct contributions to documentation and information retrieval services.
+== Contributions ==
+Kodak supplies constituted an important part of the infrastructure for administrative, commercial and social activities in all fields.
+For documentation the use of "wet" photographic images was of the greatest importance document copying until the rise of xerography and digital imaging. In particular sensitized paper was needed in the early twentieth century for rapid and widespread adoption of photostat document copying, and, especially from the mid-1930s to the 1960s for microfilming.
+=== Minicard ===
+The early microfilm rapid selectors of [[Emanuel Goldberg]] and [[Vannevar Bush]] used photoelectric sensing to search for microfilmed images on long rolls of microfilm. This required serial search of one or more rolls and then rewinding the rolls. This did not scale well. So attempts were made to approximate random search directly to any given document by using short strips ("chips") of microfilm in a a two-step process. First, an index would point to a particular chip on a rod, in a bin, or on the periphery of a wheel; then the right location on the chip would be found in order to display the desired document. However, scaling this design for very large collections as needed by intelligence agencies was difficult and very expensive because it required great precision at very high speed. [[International Business Machines|IBM]] developed such a system, named Walnut. Kodak and [[ITEK]] developed the Minicard system.
+[[John W. Kuipers]] was director of the Minicard project. Six machines were said to have been delivered, all to US Federal government agencies. Their cost was very high. Improvements in digital computing and digital storage led to their replacement.
-The collection is varied, consisting of early business correspondence, photographs, advertisements and biographies of corporate officers through the years.
+== Further reading==
+On Kodak:
+*Collins, Douglas. ''The story of Kodak.'' New York : H.N. Abrams, 1990. Coffee table book.
+*"IBM". ''Wikipedia'' [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM]
+On Minicard:
+*Tyler, Arthur W., W. L. Myers & J. W. Kuipers. "The application of the Kodak Minicard system." ''American Documentation'' 6 (1955): 18-30.
+*Kuipers, J. W. "Minicard system for documentary information." ''American Documentation'' 8 (1957): 246-268.
+*Burke, Colin B, ''America's information wars: The untold story of information systems in America's conflicts and politics from World War II to the intenet age.'' Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.