George Eastman George Eastman George Eastman (July 12, 1854 – March 14, 1932) was an American entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and popularized the use of roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream. Roll film was also the basis for the invention of motion picture film stock in 1888 by the world's first film-makers Eadweard Muybridge and Louis Le Prince, and a few years later by their followers Léon Bouly, William Kennedy Dickson, Thomas Edison, the Lumière Brothers, and Georges Méliès. He was a major philanthropist, establishing the Eastman School of Music, and schools of dentistry and medicine
Kodak $1.29 billion to just $5 million for the same period. Kodak's market share declined from 80.1% to 74.7% in the United States, a one-year drop of five percentage points that had observers suggesting that Kodak was slow to react to changes and underestimated its rivals. Although from the 1970s both Fuji and Kodak recognized the upcoming threat of digital photography, and although both sought diversification as a mitigation strategy, Fuji was more successful at diversification. Although Kodak developed a digital camera in 1975, the first of its kind, the product was dropped for fear it would threaten Kodak's photographic film