Intellectual Property Law for Engineers, Scientists, and Entrepreneurs. Howard B. Rockman
convenient, since his invention made it possible to take a camera anywhere. He was born on July 12, 1854, in the same house in which his father was born in the village of Waterville, New York. When George was five, his family moved to Rochester, New York, where his oldest sibling established the Eastman Commercial College. When the college failed and George’s father died, the family became financially unstable.
George quit school at the age of fourteen to start working to support the family. He had several jobs working at insurance firms and the Rochester Savings Bank, and his pay ranged from three to fifteen dollars per week. When Eastman was twenty‐four, he made plans to take a trip to Santo Domingo. Following a suggestion from a coworker at the bank, Eastman bought a photographic outfit equipped with all the supplies needed for wet‐plate photography. His camera was as big as a sewing machine and required a heavy tripod as a support. He also purchased plate holders, chemicals, tanks, and a tent, all of which were necessary to be able to apply photosensitive emulsion on glass plates, expose the emulsion, and then develop the images before the emulsion dried. This amounted to approximately 50 pounds of equipment. Eastman said that the equipment “was a packhorse load.”
After all this, Eastman did not make the trip, but he was enticed to find an easier way to take pictures. In 1877, after reading in British journals about photographers creating their own dry gelatin emulsions, which meant that even after the plates became dry they were still sensitive to light, Eastman decided he would do the same. Beginning with a formula he obtained from one of the British journals, he worked on creating his own gelatin emulsions almost nonstop. After three years of working in the bank during the day, and experimenting in his mother’s kitchen at night, he came up with a formula for dry plates that worked, and by 1880 he had obtained patents covering both his formula and a machine that prepared large numbers of plates.
Eastman leased a floor of a building in Rochester in April 1880 to begin manufacturing his dry plates for sale. His company prospered and grew, but faced a downturn at least once when plates went bad in the hands of dealers and Eastman recalled them and replaced the faulty plates with good ones. This recall was costly, but it greatly enhanced Eastman’s reputation.
In 1884, Eastman started working on ways to make a photographic film lighter than the dry plates that were backed by glass. His first attempt was to put the photographic emulsion on a flexible backing such as paper, and then load it into a roll holder. Despite some flaws, this development was a huge success. But, Eastman found that imperfections on or in the texture of the paper were transferred to the developed image. He then decided to eliminate this problem by applying a soluble layer of gelatin over the insoluble light‐sensitive gelatin layer. After development, the soluble gelatin layer bearing the image was lifted off, and the insoluble layer was transferred to a sheet of clear gelatin and varnished with collodion, a cellulose mixture that hardened into a rigid, transparent film. His development of transparent roll film and a roll holder resulted in the introduction of the Kodak® Camera in 1888, the first camera built to hold roll film. Film rolls capable of holding 100 pictures were loaded in the camera. After exposure, the entire camera and film were sent back to Eastman’s company, where the film was developed, the camera was reloaded and returned to the customer, all for $25.00.
A year later, Eastman created flexible transparent film, which proved vital to the development of the motion picture industry. In 1892, he established the Eastman Kodak Company at Rochester, New York. In 1900, the Kodak Brownie became the first roll‐film, hand‐held camera.
George Eastman was also very generous with the fortune he earned, donating in excess of $75 million to a multitude of projects. He endowed the Eastman School of Music in 1918 and the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in 1921. He also gave $20 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
On one day in 1924, George Eastman donated $30 million to the University of Rochester, M.I.T., Hampton Institute, and Tuskegee Institute. The latter two were schools for African‐American students, whose education was a particular concern of George Eastman.
Near the end of his life, Eastman became quite ill and became progressively disabled as a result of hardening of the cells in his lower spinal cord. He died at age 77 of his own hand on March 14, 1932.
INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS
Emile Berliner
DISC SOUND RECORDING
During the 1880s a contest developed between Thomas Edison and Volta Laboratory, a research laboratory founded by Alexander Graham Bell, where Bell's cousin, Chichester A. Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter worked on improving the phonograph that Edison had developed in 1877. The contest was directed toward transforming Edison’s 1877 tin foil phonograph, or talking machine, into a device capable of taking its place alongside the typewriter as a business correspondence device. The contest involved, among other things, finding a substance to replace tin foil as a recording medium.
By the beginning of 1887, both sides in the contest announced the invention of a machine using a wax cylinder that would be incised vertically to match the sound vibrations. The same machine used to make the recording would be used for playback. Edison defined his wax cylinder apparatus a “phonograph.” C.A. Bell and Tainter named their apparatus a “graphophone.” Neither machine was much of a success. The phonograph did not succeed as a dictating device, so Edison’s company began to market pre‐recorded wax cylinders of popular music that could be played in the office or home, or even in coin slot machines in arcades, saloons‚ and elsewhere.
Tainter made improvements to the Volta graphophone, and his team also entered the entertainment field. Both sides of the contest had applied for a patent on the vertical cutting or incising of sound vibrations into a wax cylinder, and both sides made recordings on phonograph cylinders that could be played on the graphophone and phonograph.
Meanwhile, Emile Berliner in Washington D.C. began examining in detail both the phonograph and the graphophone to learn the advantages and disadvantages of each. He soon came to the conclusion that the wax recording cylinder was too soft and fragile to last as a permanent recording. A wax cylinder would wear out rapidly, so he sought a more durable substance. Also, the vertical cut, or hill and dale cut and grooves, were not deep enough to keep the stylus from skidding across the surface of the cylinder. The graphophone had the stylus attached to a feed screw that carried the stylus over the cylinder. A constantly deep groove enabled elimination of the feed screw, but something different from the vertical cut would be required. Soft wax cylinders could not be mass produced, so if recordings were to be widely distributed, another method of mass production of exact facsimiles was necessary.
Thus, there was a need for a different type of machine in the recording industry, one that did not use soft wax cylinders, one that did not use vertical cut grooves that were alternately deep with loud sounds and shallow with soft sounds, and one that employed a relatively hard and permanent recording medium that could be easily reproduced in large quantities. Both the Edison and Tainter teams eventually overcame many of the cylinder’s defects; however, the cylinder record appeared already doomed to extinction by the flat disc record.
Emile Berliner went through many trials and errors in developing what he called the “gramophone.” Early in his work, Berliner decided upon the disc format using the lateral vibration developed by Leon Scott in Scott's phonautograph. Scott had developed his machine in the 1850s for the sole purpose of visually recording vibrations of the voice so they could be studied by those involved