Brownie camera

The invention: The first inexpensive and easy-to-use camera available
to the general public, the Brownie revolutionized photography
by making it possible for every person to become a photographer.
The people behind the invention:
George Eastman (1854-1932), founder of the Eastman Kodak
Company
Frank A. Brownell, a camera maker for the Kodak Company
who designed the Brownie
Henry M. Reichenbach, a chemist who worked with Eastman to
develop flexible film
William H. Walker, a Rochester camera manufacturer who
collaborated with Eastman
A New Way to Take Pictures
In early February of 1900, the first shipments of a new small box
camera called the Brownie reached Kodak dealers in the United
States and England. George Eastman, eager to put photography
within the reach of everyone, had directed Frank Brownell to design
a small camera that could be manufactured inexpensively but that
would still take good photographs.
Advertisements for the Brownie proclaimed that everyone—
even children—could take good pictures with the camera. The
Brownie was aimed directly at the children’s market, a fact indicated
by its box, which was decorated with drawings of imaginary
elves called “Brownies” created by the Canadian illustrator Palmer
Cox. Moreover, the camera cost only one dollar.
The Brownie was made of jute board and wood, with a hinged
back fastened by a sliding catch. It had an inexpensive two-piece
glass lens and a simple rotary shutter that allowed both timed and
instantaneous exposures to be made. With a lens aperture of approximately
f14 and a shutter speed of approximately 1/50 of a second,
the Brownie was certainly capable of taking acceptable snapshots. It had no viewfinder; however, an optional clip-on reflecting
viewfinder was available. The camera came loaded with a six-exposure
roll of Kodak film that produced square negatives 2.5 inches on
a side. This film could be developed, printed, and mounted for forty
cents, and a new roll could be purchased for fifteen cents.
George Eastman’s first career choice had been banking, but when
he failed to receive a promotion he thought he deserved, he decided
to devote himself to his hobby, photography. Having worked with a
rigorous wet-plate process, he knew why there were few amateur
photographers at the time—the whole process, from plate preparation
to printing, was too expensive and too much trouble. Even so,
he had already begun to think about the commercial possibilities of
photography; after reading of British experiments with dry-plate
technology, he set up a small chemical laboratory and came up with
a process of his own. The Eastman Dry Plate Company became one
of the most successful producers of gelatin dry plates.
Dry-plate photography had attracted more amateurs, but it was
still a complicated and expensive hobby. Eastman realized that the
number of photographers would have to increase considerably if
the market for cameras and supplies were to have any potential. In
the early 1880’s, Eastman first formulated the policies that would
make the Eastman Kodak Company so successful in years to come:
mass production, low prices, foreign and domestic distribution, and
selling through extensive advertising and by demonstration.
In his efforts to expand the amateur market, Eastman first tackled
the problem of the glass-plate negative, which was heavy, fragile,
and expensive to make. By 1884, his experiments with paper
negatives had been successful enough that he changed the name of
his company to The Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company. Since
flexible roll film needed some sort of device to hold it steady in the
camera’s focal plane, Eastman collaborated with William Walker
to develop the Eastman-Walker roll-holder. Eastman’s pioneering
manufacture and use of roll films led to the appearance on the market
in the 1880’s of a wide array of hand cameras from a number of
different companies. Such cameras were called “detective cameras”
because they were small and could be used surreptitiously. The
most famous of these, introduced by Eastman in 1888, was named
the “Kodak”—a word he coined to be terse, distinctive, and easily pronounced in any language. This camera’s simplicity of operation
was appealing to the general public and stimulated the growth of
amateur photography.
The Camera
The Kodak was a box about seven inches long and four inches
wide, with a one-speed shutter and a fixed-focus lens that produced
reasonably sharp pictures. It came loaded with enough roll film to
make one hundred exposures. The camera’s initial price of twentyfive
dollars included the cost of processing the first roll of film; the
camera also came with a leather case and strap. After the film was
exposed, the camera was mailed, unopened, to the company’s plant
in Rochester, New York, where the developing and printing were
done. For an additional ten dollars, the camera was reloaded and
sent back to the customer.
The Kodak was advertised in mass-market publications, rather
than in specialized photographic journals, with the slogan: “You
press the button, we do the rest.”With his introduction of a camera
that was easy to use and a service that eliminated the need to know
anything about processing negatives, Eastman revolutionized the
photographic market. Thousands of people no longer depended
upon professional photographers for their portraits but instead
learned to make their own. In 1892, the Eastman Dry Plate and Film
Company became the Eastman Kodak Company, and by the mid-
1890’s, one hundred thousand Kodak cameras had been manufactured
and sold, half of them in Europe by Kodak Limited.
Having popularized photography with the first Kodak, in 1900
Eastman turned his attention to the children’s market with the introduction
of the Brownie. The first five thousand cameras sent to
dealers were sold immediately; by the end of the following year, almost
a quarter of a million had been sold. The Kodak Company organized
Brownie camera clubs and held competitions specifically
for young photographers. The Brownie came with an instruction
booklet that gave children simple directions for taking successful
pictures, and “The Brownie Boy,” an appealing youngster who
loved photography, became a standard feature of Kodak’s advertisements.
Impact
Eastman followed the success of the first Brownie by introducing
several additional models between 1901 and 1917. Each was a more
elaborate version of the original. These Brownie box cameras were
on the market until the early 1930’s, and their success inspired other
companies to manufacture box cameras of their own. In 1906, the
Ansco company produced the Buster Brown camera in three sizes
that corresponded to Kodak’s Brownie camera range; in 1910 and
1914, Ansco made three more versions. The Seneca company’s
Scout box camera, in three sizes, appeared in 1913, and Sears Roebuck’s
Kewpie cameras, in five sizes, were sold beginning in 1916.
In England, the Houghtons company introduced its first Scout camera
in 1901, followed by another series of four box cameras in 1910
sold under the Ensign trademark. Other English manufacturers of
box cameras included the James Sinclair company, with its Traveller
Una of 1909, and the Thornton-Pickard company, with a Filma camera
marketed in four sizes in 1912.
After World War I ended, several series of box cameras were
manufactured in Germany by companies that had formerly concentrated
on more advanced and expensive cameras. The success of
box cameras in other countries, led by Kodak’s Brownie, undoubtedly
prompted this trend in the German photographic industry. The
Ernemann Film K series of cameras in three sizes, introduced in
1919, and the all-metal Trapp LittleWonder of 1922 are examples of
popular German box cameras.
In the early 1920’s, camera manufacturers began making boxcamera
bodies from metal rather than from wood and cardboard.
Machine-formed metal was less expensive than the traditional handworked
materials. In 1924, Kodak’s two most popular Brownie sizes
appeared with aluminum bodies.
In 1928, Kodak Limited of England added two important new
features to the Brownie—a built-in portrait lens, which could be
brought in front of the taking lens by pressing a lever, and camera
bodies in a range of seven different fashion colors. The Beau
Brownie cameras, made in 1930, were the most popular of all the
colored box cameras. The work ofWalter Dorwin Teague, a leading
American designer, these cameras had an Art Deco geometric pattern on the front panel, which was enameled in a color matching the
leatherette covering of the camera body. Several other companies,
including Ansco, again followed Kodak’s lead and introduced their
own lines of colored cameras.
In the 1930’s, several new box cameras with interesting features appeared,
many manufactured by leading film companies. In France, the
Lumiere Company advertised a series of box cameras—the Luxbox,
Scoutbox, and Lumibox—that ranged from a basic camera to one with
an adjustable lens and shutter. In 1933, the German Agfa company restyled
its entire range of box cameras, and in 1939, the Italian Ferrania
company entered the market with box cameras in two sizes. In 1932,
Kodak redesigned its Brownie series to take the new 620 roll film,
which it had just introduced. This film and the new Six-20 Brownies inspired
other companies to experiment with variations of their own;
some box cameras, such as the Certo Double-box, the Coronet Every
Distance, and the Ensign E-20 cameras, offered a choice of two picture
formats.
Another new trend was a move toward smaller-format cameras
using standard 127 roll film. In 1934, Kodak marketed the small
Baby Brownie. Designed by Teague and made from molded black
plastic, this little camera with a folding viewfinder sold for only one
dollar—the price of the original Brownie in 1900.
The Baby Brownie, the first Kodak camera made of molded plastic,
heralded the move to the use of plastic in camera manufacture.
Soon many others, such as the Altissa series of box cameras and the
Voigtlander Brilliant V/6 camera, were being made from this new material.
Later Trends
By the late 1930’s, flashbulbs had replaced flash powder for taking
pictures in low light; again, the Eastman Kodak Company led
the way in introducing this new technology as a feature on the inexpensive
box camera. The Falcon Press-Flash, marketed in 1939, was
the first mass-produced camera to have flash synchronization and
was followed the next year by the Six-20 Flash Brownie, which had a
detachable flash gun. In the early 1940’s, other companies, such as
Agfa-Ansco, introduced this feature on their own box cameras.In the years after World War II, the box camera evolved into an
eye-level camera, making it more convenient to carry and use.
Many amateur photographers, however, still had trouble handling paper-backed roll film and were taking their cameras back to dealers
to be unloaded and reloaded. Kodak therefore developed a new
system of film loading, using the Kodapak cartridge, which could
be mass-produced with a high degree of accuracy by precision plastic-
molding techniques. To load the camera, the user simply opened
the camera back and inserted the cartridge. This new film was introduced
in 1963, along with a series of Instamatic cameras designed
for its use. Both were immediately successful.
The popularity of the film cartridge ended the long history of the
simple and inexpensive roll film camera. The last English Brownie
was made in 1967, and the series of Brownies made in the United
States was discontinued in 1970. Eastman’s original marketing strategy
of simplifying photography in order to increase the demand for
cameras and film continued, however, with the public’s acceptance
of cartridge-loading cameras such as the Instamatic.
From the beginning, Eastman had recognized that there were
two kinds of photographers other than professionals. The first, he
declared, were the true amateurs who devoted time enough to acquire
skill in the complex processing procedures of the day. The second
were those who merely wanted personal pictures or memorabilia
of their everyday lives, families, and travels. The second class,
he observed, outnumbered the first by almost ten to one. Thus, it
was to this second kind of amateur photographer that Eastman had
appealed, both with his first cameras and with his advertising slogan,
“You press the button, we do the rest.” Eastman had done
much more than simply invent cameras and films; he had invented
a system and then developed the means for supporting that system.
This is essentially what the Eastman Kodak Company continued to
accomplish with the series of Instamatics and other descendants of
the original Brownie. In the decade between 1963 and 1973, for example,
approximately sixty million Instamatics were sold throughout
the world.
The research, manufacturing, and marketing activities of the
Eastman Kodak Company have been so complex and varied that no
one would suggest that the company’s prosperity rests solely on the
success of its line of inexpensive cameras and cartridge films, although
these have continued to be important to the company. Like
Kodak, however, most large companies in the photographic industry have expanded their research to satisfy the ever-growing demand
from amateurs. The amateurism that George Eastman recognized
and encouraged at the beginning of the twentieth century
thus still flourished at its end.