

It also coincided with Eastman�s purchase of Houston�s first patent. Eastman claimed the rest was a �purely arbitrary collection of letters.� But according to a book written by Houston�s niece, the rest of the name came from a common abbreviation of Houston�s home of North Dakota, Nodak, which became a state at just the time Eastman was naming his company. � and �it must mean absolutely nothing.� He liked the letter k in particular and wanted the company name to start with it. Said Eastman, �A trademark should be short � vigorous � incapable of being misspelled. Houston also licensed patents for other designs to Kodak, including folding, panoramic, and magazine-loaded cameras.Īnd Houston may have contributed to Eastman choosing the name Kodak for his company. In return, Houston received a total of $5750 for his efforts � a considerable sum for a nineteenth century farmer. Houston ultimately wound up licensing his patent to Kodak as George Eastman consolidated the photographic industry. While Houston wasn�t versed in the technology required to make film, he could see that film was coming and how it would be used when it arrived. The first plastic roll film wouldn�t be available for a decade after the camera patent had been issued. And the true genius of Houston�s patent? It came before roll film had been invented. The patent described a camera that used a roll of film just as we use today. In 1881, a year after arriving in North Dakota, he filed the first of many patents. At age thirty-nine, Houston moved to what is now North Dakota, where he made a living as a farmer.īut Houston also proved a capable inventor. where they ultimately settled in Wisconsin. That same year, his family emigrated to the U.S. Houston was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1841. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons.Įnter David Henderson Houston. Old studio camera Alter Studio Fotoapparat. Further, a photographer was required to remove and insert a new plate after each photograph.

The size and weight of the plates made portability an issue. Prior to roll film, photographers relied on plates typically made of glass. How to: Load film into your camera from Kirsten Zinger on Vimeo. Yet, roll film was itself a huge innovation when it was first introduced an innovation that helped put cameras in the hands of amateur photographers and kept the industry, well, rolling along for almost a century. Everyone had their story about the amazing snapshot lost to history because the film was either loaded or unloaded incorrectly. We�d fumble around threading rolls into our cameras and later rewinding them for developing. That means many of us spent a good part of our lives working with film, not files.

Kodak sofortbild station kaufen series#
The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.ĭigital cameras arrived on the scene in the late 1980s.
