Kodak: You press the button

In 1888, George Eastman wrote a simple line, “You press the button, we do the rest.” He invented the name Kodak because he liked the letter K. And of course, he figured out how to simplify photography.

This is a pivotal moment in the history of the button.

Eastman had a vision. Anybody can be a photographer. He was working during a time when you had to lug around a wheelbarrow of equipment and develop your own glass plates to make a photograph. The idea of anybody doing this was preposterous, as most brilliant ideas are.

But how do you communicate to everyday people that they too can participate in this advanced technology? How do you eliminate preconceived notions of difficulty and complexity to say, those days are over, it’s easy now?

Eastman knew. You press the button. All you have to worry about is getting your subject in the frame. Then push this one button. We do the rest. Don’t worry about developing film or anything like that. Just bring your roll of film, and for a small fee, we’ll do all the hard parts. Automation. Ease of use. Simplicity. Push the button.

This may be where “push the button” was first overtly linked to “it’s so easy anybody can do it” in advertising. This may be the moment that sets the tone for all the subsequent radios, washing machines and computers. Eastman wrote the code.

This jumps the story a few years before where I had been starting it. I’m not surprised. All histories resist clean and simple origins. They evolve, they grow. There’s always something in the past that affects the now. So we jump back before electricity to where buttons were purely mechanical creatures. Fancy levers. I imagine the story will jump back even earlier.

P.S. There was even a song written about Kodak and the button, but I’ll save that for the next post. It’s that good.

(Thanks to peterme for pointing me to the Kodak part of this story.)