George Eastman [antikvár]

FOREWORD GEORGE M. C. FISHER President and Chief Executive Officer Eastman Kodak Company George Eastman's life in photography spans the half-century from 1880 to 1930, when science, technology and culture converged to create "new products" of all sorts: automobiles, x-rays. Cubist paintings, lightbulbs, world war, skyscrapers, relativity theory, jazz. And snapshots. Like Alexander Graham Bell, Eastman tinkered his way to a universally welcome invention. Like Henry Ford, he put his name on his company. Like Thomas Edison, he shaped his products to world markets hungry for their startling benefits. But we do not need a biography to tell us that. We already know the who, what, where, when. It's the how we want to know, and, even more, the why. Was Eastman really so gifted? Or was he simply a moment ahead of his time, a step ahead of the competition? What was he like? What was his mind like? Was he happy? Elizabeth Brayer leads us to as many of these answers as we are likely to discover. She shows how George Eastman applied his nineteenth-century self-reliance to an age suddenly teeming with invention, mass production, and free markets. And she leads us to see how technology came to affect daily life in ways that continue today. To illustrate, glance down at your wrist. The second hand sweeps (or the digits flicker) with a silent precision never imagined by the great watchmakers of Zurich. Yet ask anyone just how a twenty-dollar watch works—just what that quartz gizmo does, anyway—and chances are you'll face puzzled annoyance. Ask someone what a microwave is. Or a microprocessor. Ask someone how word processors work, or satellite dishes. Fax machines, or color film. If there were a slogan for our age it might read: "You press the button. 'It' will somehow do the rest."