If you’d been around on September 4, 1923 and had one of those newfangled box cameras everybody seemed to be buying, you might have taken a photo of the USS Shenandoah on its first-ever flight. It was the first airship in the US (they’d been in use in Europe for quite some time). It was a rigid design like a Zeppelin, and was the first airship to cross North America. It only lasted until 1925, though, when it was destroyed in a storm. Plenty of people took photos of the crash sites too — it came down in pieces in Ohio, near Caldwell, in the southeastern corner of the state.
Chances are that you would have taken your photos with a camera that used a roll of film, probably from the Eastman Kodak company. It was September 4, 1888 that George Eastman registered the Kodak trademark — it was the same day he received his patent on a camera that used a roll of film rather than individual sheets or plates. He’d already patented the film.
Eastman came up with the Kodak trademark because it was “short, easy to pronounce, and [didn’t] resemble any other name.” As for why it began and ended with the letter “k”, he chose it because “it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter.” He and his mother came up with it using a set of tiles from a game of Anagrams — like Scrabble, but without the board.
Kodak had a near-monopoly on photographic film (and sold 85% of the cameras) in the US as late as the mid-1970s. But the company seemed to start making big mistakes soon after that. They didn’t think they needed to buy the rights to be the official film of the 1984 Olympics, so Fujifilm did. Then Kodak believed their customers would never switch brands, but once they found out about Fujifilm (by watching the Olympics), which was less expensive and better in some ways, they did. Kodak invented the handheld digital camera as early as 1975, but didn’t market it for fear it would threaten their film business. It wasn’t until 1994 that they brought out a digital camera — still pretty early — but they didn’t market it as a Kodak product. It was the Apple QuickTake series.
Everybody knows the next chapter of the Kodak story — it was Chapter 11. They filed for bankruptcy in 2012. As part of their bankruptcy plan they sold off most of their patents, some to Google — which, by coincidence, had been incorporated exactly 100 years to the day after Kodak was created — September 4, 1988.
It’s pretty common for technologies to start out large and get smaller over time — Kodak cameras were smaller than their predecessors, and the Minox, patented in the 1930s, was even smaller. It was the preferred camera for 20th Century spies (or at least spy movies) — and its inventor, Walter Zapp, was born on September 4.The telephone is another example. The version patented by Alexander Graham Bell was huge compared to what phones are today.
Kodak, AT&T, General Electric, Google — they’re all businesses originally based on patents. If you want a patent, particularly a patent on a physical machine, you need to submit diagrams. Lewis Latimer was born on September 4, 1848 — and was the person who created the diagrams for Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent, and the diagrams for General Electric’s electric light bulb patents.
You could read about all the September 4 events, from airships to cameras to corporate successes and failures, in a newspaper. For decades, you’d find a newspaper waiting on your doorstep, brought by a newspaper carrier — so just remember that September 4 is also National Newspaper Carrier Day. Why is that day on September 4? Because today’s the day, in 1833, that Barney Flaherty was hired by the New York Sun — he was the first newspaper carrier.
