Snapshots on the Moon but it couldn’t rise to digital rivals

Eastman American Film was introduced in 1885, the first transparent photographic “film” as we know it today.

The name Kodak was born in 1888, apparently he and his mother devising the name using an anagram set. Eastman said that there were three principal concepts he used when creating the name – it should be short, it could not be mispronounced and it could not resemble anything or be associated with anything but Kodak.

The Kodak camera was placed on the market with the slogan “You press the button – we do the rest”, a moment regarded as the birth of snapshot photography.

Nearly a century after the firm was founded, Neil Armstrong used a Kodak camera the size of a shoebox to take pictures as he became the first man to walk on the Moon in 1969.

Those pictures arguably had more viewers than the 80 films that have won Best Picture Oscars and were shot on Kodak film.

The company dominated the industry at the time and the phrase “Kodak moment” entered common usage as a personal event that demanded to be recorded for posterity.

Six years after Armstrong’s walk, Kodak invented the digital camera. The size of a toaster, it was too big for the pockets of amateur photographers, and Kodak put the idea on the back-burner and spent years watching rivals take market share that it would never reclaim.

Since the late 1990s, Kodak has struggled financially as a result of the decline in sales of photographic film, and 2007 was the most recent year in which the company made a profit, although in 1994 it spun off a chemicals business, Eastman Chemical Co, which proved to be more successful.

Kodak’s final downfall in the eyes of investors began in September when it unexpectedly withdrew $160 million from a credit line.