Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (76 page)

But the most important selling point of this new system was that Eastman offered to develop and print all of the pictures taken with Kodak cameras—something no camera maker had ever offered before. He sold the Kodaks loaded with enough film for 100 pictures, and when these were used up the owner could, for $10, mail the entire camera back to Rochester. The company would remove the film, process and print the pictures, and return them to the owner along with the camera, freshly loaded with enough film for 100 more pictures.

“You press the button,” the company’s slogan went, “We do the rest.”

The Kodak camera went on sale in June 1888. It was followed by an improved model, the Kodak No. 2, in 1889. By September of that year, Eastman had sold more than 5,000 cameras in the U.S. and was developing an average of 7,000 photographs a day.

Eastman quickly came to understand that the real money in the photography business wasn’t in selling cameras—each customer needed only one—it was in selling and processing film. This gave him an incentive to lower the cost of his cameras, so that more people could afford to buy the film. In 1895 he introduced a Pocket Kodak camera, which at $5 was Kodak’s first truly affordable camera. Then in 1900 he introduced the Brownie, which sold for $1. Eastman sold more than 100,000 Brownies in the first year.

The notebooks used by Marie and Pierre Curie are still too radioactive to be handled safely.

Most photographers had approached photography as an art form, but Eastman worried that if his customers did the same thing, they might get bored with their new hobby and find something else to do. He believed that if he could convince the public to use their cameras to document birthdays, summer vacations, and other special moments of their lives—once a family purchased a camera they would never go without one again.

Accordingly, Kodak’s advertisements featured parents photographing their children, and children photographing each other. The Kodak Girl, one of the most popular advertising icons of the early 20th century, was shown taking her camera everywhere: to the mountains and the beach, on yachts, and on bicycle rides in the country.

“Don’t let another week-end slip by without a Kodak,” the magazine ads cooed. “Take a Kodak with you.” And millions of people did.

Eastman believed that the best way to stay ahead of the competition was to constantly improve his products, and to protect his improvements with patents, which would guarantee sole ownership of those markets. In 1886 he became one of the first American businessmen to hire a full-time research scientist, Henry Reichenbach.

One of Reichenbach’s first triumphs was a roll film that used a solution of guncotton or
nitrocellulose
—the same substance that served as the basis for the collodion process—as a base, instead of paper. The first rolls went on sale in August 1889; when it did, film as we know it was born and the word
snapshot
entered the language.

True to form, Eastman patented the chemistry and every step of the manufacturing process so that Kodak would have the roll film market all to itself; then, when the profits started rolling in, he used the money for more research and more patents—so that the company would continue to dominate the industry it had played such a huge part in creating.

BRI poll results: 76% of bathroom readers prefer their TP to hang over the top.

In 1891 Kodak marketed its first “daylight-loading” camera, which allowed the user to reload film into a camera without a darkroom. In 1896, just a year after the discovery of X-rays, Eastman began manufacturing plates and paper for X-ray photographs; that same year, Kodak began selling the first motion picture film. Film for “talkies”—motion pictures with sound—followed in 1929.

These advancements continued long after Eastman’s death in 1932. In 1936 Kodak brought Kodachrome Film to market, the world’s first amateur color slide film; they introduced color print film in 1942. Instamatic cameras, which used easy-to-load film cartridges instead of rolls, came out in 1963; the company sold more than 50 million Instamatics in the next seven years alone. Super-8 home movie cameras hit the market in 1965, and Kodak dominated that market too.

Decades of continuous innovation have turned Kodak into a household word, synonymous with photography itself. When astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in 1962, a Kodak camera in the space capsule recorded the event. When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon seven years later, he had a Kodak with him.

Eastman accomplished what he had set out to accomplish—he brought photography to the masses. Now, with the advent of digital technology, film photography may soon disappear, like the disposable cameras Kodak makes today. But that doesn’t take away from the miracle of what the pioneers of photography achieved—capturing actual images from the air and preserving them for all time, an amazing feat that once seemed as impossible as catching lightning in a bottle.

Random Fact:
King James IV banned golf from Scotland in 1491 for the simple reason that, it “looketh like a silly game.”

The world’s remotest inhabited island, Tristan da Cunha, is 1,750 miles from the nearest civilization.

Is
blood thicker than water? Not when there’s money and power involved. Here are two feuds from the BRI files that prove the point.

The Contestants:
Murry Wilson, father of three of the Beach Boys—Dennis, Brian, and Carl Wilson—and the uncle of Mike Love. He was also the band’s first first manager… and according to his three sons, he was also an abusive tyrant.

The Feud:
Murry managed the band for the first three years of its existence, from 1962 until 1964. By then the Wilsons and the Loves had had enough of his explosive temper, and they fired him while working on the tracks for “I Get Around.”

At first Murry refused to accept that his sons were even capable of firing him. Then, convinced that he was the one responsible for their success, he retaliated by forming a new group, the Sun Rays, and set out to “teach those ungrateful little bastards a lesson.”

And the Winner Is:
The Beach Boys—although for a short time it seemed that the Sun Rays might actually make it big. Their third single, “I Live for the Sun,” actually made it onto the pop charts, but that was the best they ever did. “After several more singles,” Dennis Wilson writes, “they faded into the background.”

From Beyond the Grave:
Before he died in 1973, Murry Wilson reconciled with his son, Brian… they even wrote a song together in 1969, called “Break Away.” But behind Brian’s back, Murry had sold Brian’s publishing company, Sea of Tunes, which he controlled. Murry got $700,000; Brian got nothing. Brian sued, and won $ 10 million, but never got the publishing rights back. The final winner: Murry Wilson.

The Contestants:
Charles and his brother J. Frank, two bicycle makers living in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the 1880s.

The Feud:
The Duryea brothers are generally credited with building the first working automobile in the United States. After reading a description of German automaker Karl Benz’s car in an 1889 issue of
Scientific American,
they set out to make a car of their own; on September 1, 1893, they drove their car 600 feet down the streets of Springfield.

The Wok began as a Bronze Age Mongolian helmet that doubled as a cooking pan.

One question still haunts the Duryea family today: Which of the brothers deserves the most credit for inventing the car? Not long after they started building it—and before they had one that actually worked—Charles went back to his bicycle business in Peoria, Illinois, and did not return for more than a year. By the time he got back, J. Frank had solved all of the technical problems by himself, without any help from Charles.

Unfortunately, for all his talent as a mechanic, J. Frank neglected to make sure he received credit for his contributions. He let Charles file the patent for their engine… and Charles listed himself as the only inventor. For the rest of his life he took full credit for the Duryea automobile, dismissing J. Frank as “simply a mechanic” he’d hired to execute his designs. The resulting feud shortened the life of their auto company, too: The brothers only managed to make 13 cars before they closed up shop and went their separate ways.

And the Winner Is:
Nobody, not even after all these years. Charles and Frank’s descendants are still fighting over which brother is the true inventor of the first American car.

The Amazing Fasting Girl

Background:
In the 1870s, a Welsh teenager named Sarah Jacobs became famous for her ability to fast for months on end. Her parents put her on exhibit, claiming she’d gone more than two years without eating a single piece of food.

Exposed:
Concerned that the exhibit was a fraud, Welsh officials decided to test the Jacob family’s claims by putting young Sarah in the care of a professional nurse, who would verify whether the girl ate anything or not. When she died from starvation nine days later, her parents were arrested and went to prison for fraud.

A groaner: What do you call Santa’s helpers? Subordinate clauses.

One day we made the mistake of saying, “We’re bored.” Auntie Lenna handed us this and said, “It’s easy! Just count the triangles. There are more than 50 and less than 100.”
Answer
on
page 513
.

Number of fireflies it would take to generate the visible brightness of the sun: 14.3 billion.

Why are we so intrigued by death? Because it’s a part of life.… And besides, we’ve all got to go sometime. So why not enjoy a chuckle while we’re here?

In late 1997, homeowner Eugene Bearringer stopped paying taxes on his home in Toledo, Ohio. Repeated attempts to contact Bearringer and his out-of-state relatives were futile, so in November 2000, county officials foreclosed on the property and sold it at auction—sight unseen—to William Houttekier of Temperance, Michigan. The following week, Houttekier went to Toledo to tour his new home… and found Bearringer’s skeletal remains on the living room floor, where they had laid undiscovered and undisturbed for more than two years—about the same length of time that he’d gone without paying his property taxes. Bearringer, an asthmatic, had apparently died from natural causes.