110 - THE LITTLE FILM FORMAT THAT COULD
At the height of its powers, Kodak was the inventor and innovator that shaped several aspects of photography for both amateurs and professionals. The objective was always to make photography more accessible to everybody via simpler processes and smaller, more affordable cameras... which, of course, would generate increased demand for film and printing materials. This was where Kodak made the profits it could plough into what was, at one time, the biggest and most sophisticated R&D facility in the world. Beyond its many pioneering products, Kodak was also renowned for its engineering prowess.
It all started with the creation of rollfilm - to replace glass plates - by George Eastman’s fledgling company in 1885, a couple of years before he came up with the name “Kodak” (which, by the way, meant nothing; he just liked the way it looked and sounded). This first rollfilm was paperbased and required a complex developing process to produce B&W negatives, so Eastman came up with the clever solution of packaging everything up into one product.
In The Beginning
In 1888, the first Kodak camera was introduced - a simple box-type design - and it came preloaded with enough paper rollfilm to give 100 photographs. After it was finished, the camera was sent back to Kodak for the film to be unloaded and processed. The camera was then reloaded and returned to its owner along with the prints, prompting the famous Kodak advertising slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest” This arrangement eliminated any potential problems with film handling - a big risk at the time given few people understood the technology - but it was very expensive, limiting its appeal beyond wealthy early adopters.
Eastman continued to work on ways of making photography more accessible to the masses and the first step was rollfilm using a transparent plastic - or celluloid - base that was easier to process and, more importantly, when packaged in a light-proof cartridge,
