Thursday, January 18, 2012, George Eastman’s, Eastman Kodak Company filed in New York for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The very well known Kodak company reported assets of $5.1 billion and debts of $6.75 billion in the filing.
George Eastman, a high school dropout from upstate New York, founded Kodak in 1880, as he began to make history with photographic plates. It took Eastman all of $125 bucks, to get his business off the ground, to purchase a second-hand engine.
Eight years later, the Kodak name had a trademark, introduced the hand-held camera as well as roll-up film, and became the Household name of picture taking and movie filming.
Kodak once dominated its industry but it failed to embrace today’s technologies quickly enough, like the digital camera — ironically, a Kodak invention.
Its struggling anxieties hit Rochester, New York, with employment dropping to about 7,000 from more than 60,000 during it’s propelling growth years.
Its market value has sunk to below $150 million from $31 billion 15 years ago.
Nearly a century after Kodak’s founding, the astronaut Neil Armstrong used a box Kodak camera to capture the beauty on the moon as he became known as the first person to ever walk on the moon. That was in 1969.
