Eastman Kodak Company

George Eastman founded Kodak in 1888 with a product so simple its marketing slogan wrote itself: "You press the button, we do the rest." Before Kodak, photography required professional training, heavy equipment, and chemical expertise. Eastman's camera came pre-loaded with film for 100 exposures. You sent the entire camera back to Kodak, who developed the film and returned the camera reloaded. Photography became accessible to ordinary people for the first time.

In 1975, a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built the world's first digital camera — a device the size of a toaster that captured 0.01 megapixel images onto a cassette tape. When Sasson demonstrated it to Kodak management, executives asked him not to tell anyone about it. The digital camera would make film obsolete. Film was Kodak's entire business model. The invention was shelved. It is among the most consequential acts of corporate self-sabotage in history.

In 1996, Kodak was at its zenith — a $28 billion company with 145,000 employees, controlling 80% of the U.S. film market. The Kodak Moment had entered the cultural lexicon. Every significant family event — births, weddings, graduations — was documented on Kodak film. The company was so dominant that the U.S. government had required it to license patents to competitors to prevent monopoly abuse.

Kodak filed for bankruptcy in January 2012 — 133 years after its founding. The company's most valuable remaining assets were its patent portfolio, which it auctioned for $525 million. The buyers included Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung — the companies that had built the digital photography industry on foundations Kodak had laid and then abandoned. The company that had invented digital photography sold its patents to the companies that had commercialised it.

Having emerged from bankruptcy in 2013 as a much smaller company focused on commercial printing and chemicals, Kodak spent 2024-2025 attempting a further transformation: pivoting toward pharmaceutical manufacturing. The company's Rochester facilities, which retained FDA-compliant chemical production capabilities from its film-making era, began producing phosphate buffered saline for laboratory use — a stepping stone toward more complex products like injectable IV saline. In Q2 2025, Kodak posted a net loss of $26 million and a "going concern" warning from auditors. The company had 79,000 patents from 130 years of R&D and fewer than 4,000 employees. Its most famous product was a memory of a world that no longer existed.