PICTURE THIS

We tend to think of wealthy industrialists as pictures of pure greed. But here’s a man who changed the world twice, once in how he created his fortune, and once in how he gave it away.

EARLY DEVELOPMENTS

George Eastman, founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, was born in 1854 in Waterville, New York. His family moved to Rochester, the town he would later put on the map, when he was five. Two years later, his father died. George managed to stay in school until he was 14, but then he had to go to work to help support his mother and two sisters.

Eastman was incredibly driven. He got his first job as a messenger boy for an insurance company, and within a year was writing insurance policies. His $5-a-week salary wasn’t enough for the family, so he studied accounting in the evenings and got a job as a bank clerk. By 23, he’d saved enough money to consider going into real estate, and he’d heard there were good deals down south—in the Dominican Republic.

GETTING THE PICTURE

When Eastman started planning a trip to the tropics, a friend suggested he keep a record of it. That prompted him to buy some photographic equipment—“a pack-horse load,” as he later put it. In those days, photography used the “wet plate” process, which required immediate developing, so photographers had to carry portable darkrooms everywhere they went. The trip to the West Indies fell through, but Eastman’s fate was sealed: He’d fallen in love with photography, and he wanted to simplify it.

In 1878, he started experimenting with a new “dry plate” process being developed in Europe. By 1879, he’d patented a machine that could mass-produce dry plates, and the following year he started the Eastman Dry Plate Company. But his biggest inventions were still to come. In 1885, Eastman invented the first transparent photographic film. Then in 1888, he introduced the revolutionary Kodak handheld camera, which came preloaded with film.

After the film was exposed, the camera could be sent back to the company, where it was developed. Then the camera was returned to the customer loaded with new film.

With the slogan, “You press the button—we do the rest,” the camera changed the world of photography forever. In 1889, Eastman invented the flexible “roll” of film, which would make Edison’s invention of the motion picture camera possible just three years later. His company, now called the Eastman Kodak Company, would soon become a hugely successful international corporation, and would make Eastman one of the wealthiest men alive.

GIVING BACK

But Eastman’s innovations weren’t limited to photography. While other successful business owners sought ways to wring everything they could from their employees for as little pay as possible, Eastman saw his employees as the very reason for his success and thought they should get a share of the profits. In 1899, he began paying employees sizable bonuses out of his own pocket.

In 1912, Eastman shocked the industrial world when he set up a “wage dividend” program, through which each employee would receive a share of the company’s profits. In 1919, he went further, giving a third of his company holdings—worth about $10 million— to his employees. He also started retirement, life insurance, and disability-benefits programs. Such benefits were virtually unheard of at the time. But Eastman’s generosity didn’t stop there.

• In 1901, he gave the Mechanics Institute (now known as the Rochester Institute of Technology), a gift of $625,000, equivalent to $13.9 million in today’s dollars.

• Over the years, he donated more than $20 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—because some of his most valuable assistants were MIT graduates. He insisted the donations be attributed to a “Mr. Smith.”

• Eastman had trouble with his teeth when he was young. So in 1917, he donated $2.5 million to create a free dental clinic in Rochester. He would go on to fund similar clinics in New York, London, Paris, Rome, Brussels, and Stockholm.

• Eastman was also a huge supporter of the arts. In 1921, he set up what became the Eastman School of Music, still one of the most respected music schools in the country, and helped to create the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra (now the Eastman Rochester Philharmonic).

• In 1924, he made huge donations to four colleges: the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes—both African American colleges in the South—as well as the University of Rochester and MIT. The four checks totaled $30 million. He is said to have laid his pen down afterward and said, “Now I feel better.”

THE END OF THE PICTURE

It is estimated that George Eastman gave away, with little fanfare, more than $100 million in his lifetime—billions in today’s dollars. But perhaps the most remarkable thing is that it was his entire fortune; he never married and had no children. And even if he had had children, he probably wouldn’t have left them much money; he once quipped that those who passed their wealth to children created “whoremongers of their sons and gilded parasites of their daughters.”

Eastman took his own life on March 14, 1932, at the age of 77. He’d been suffering from hardening of the cells in his lower spinal cord, and the inability to remain as active as he had grown accustomed to was apparently too much for him. He left a simple note: “To my friends; My work is done. Why wait? G.E.”

“Jingle Bells” was originally written for Thanksgiving, not Christmas.