It’s not that the company was “one large sand castle;” but Kodak’s existence has nearly been rendered obsolete as digital cameras and online photo albums continue to grow in popularity.

Starting 2012, it became generally known that Kodak was attempting to sell its patents in an effort to stave off filing for bankruptcy. Although it’s conceivable that the company could rebound, its fundamental problem is that it was built around the practice of physically capturing, storing and copying images.

During its “glory years,” Kodak employed 65,000 workers in Rochester alone. Today, there are 6,000 employees.

“Back in the old days, we had it so good,” said retired Kodak engineer Jack Bloemendaal, who worked at the company from 1964 to the early 1990s. “Anytime we wanted more money for research and development, it was always there. The company was built around film. The profits from film were astronomical. We were at the top of the roller coaster, I’d say between at least the 1950s through the 1990s. I was very happy in my occupation.”

Bloemendaal remembers when colleague Steven Sasson unveiled the first digital camera. “It was called the first ’filmless camera,’ and that didn’t have the right buzz words with Kodak,” Bloemendaal recalled. “It was very high end. It was kind of swept under the rug.”

As a result, critics maintain the 131-year-old company failed to keep up with its own technology. While most stores carry digital cameras with names like Nikon, Sony, Canon and Fujifilm, often all you’ll ever find from Kodak are memory cards and disposable cameras.

Bloemendaal began seeing the Kodak company’s fortune turning in the early 1990s. “Around the early 1990s it seems like we were going into a decline,” he said. “It seemed like everything was going to pot. We knew that digital was coming, but we didn’t expect it to unroll so quickly.”

Bloemendaal was initially attracted to working for Kodak, due to a longtime interest in photography. He is a co-founder of The Photographic Historical Society, the oldest such society in the world, which first met in January 1966. He has a collection of more than 250 vintage cameras, including an 1890 Kodak No. 4. He and his wife, Sharon, are active volunteers with the esteemed George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester.

The Eastman House is a non-profit museum established in 1947. It has no affiliation with Kodak, and is in no way affected by company stability. The museum has a wealth of Kodak material in its archives and on display; however, it also has artifacts from other inventors and entrepreneurs. It has been established as a National Historic Landmark.

However, the inventor and entrepreneur of its day was unquestionably George Eastman (1854-1932) who was in the forefront of 19th and 20th century technology. Eastman founded the company on his invention of roll film, designed to bring photography to the mainstream.

Using today’s terminology, Eastman effective “shrunk the memory” of the camera to a roll film rather than plates. As a result, more exposures could be made – and ironically, like digital photography today – the camera was easily transported and pictures could easily be processed.

During Eastman’s tenure, Kodak was an aggressive inventor and marketer. In the magazines of the day, one advertisement explained: “The trademark ’KODAK’ was first applied, in 1888, to a camera manufactured by us and intended for amateur use. It was simply invented – made up from letters of the alphabet to meet our trademark requirements. It was short and euphonious and likely to stick in the public mind, and therefore seemed to us to be admirably adapted to use in exploiting our new product.”

The Kodak No. 1 came loaded with film, making it a ready-to-use tool. In fact, it came with 100 exposures, which photography historian Nancy Martha West estimated was 10 times more photographs than an average middle-class family owned in 1888 – the year the camera was marketed.

“Simply by ’pressing a button,’ advertisements assured the American public, amateur photographers could realize what had been a dominant hope of American culture since the 19th century: the hope of effortless abundance,” West wrote in her 2000 book, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia.

For more than 100 years, Kodak has given Americans that “hope of effortless abundance,” going so far as once pushing the advertising jingo: “Let Kodak keep the story.”

Today, seemingly, the story may remain basically the same. But, the messenger has been killed.

These snapshots as a piece of social media – once shared in photo albums (now being found in antique stores and estate auctions) – have been relegated to a newer technology.

In rolling out the Facebook Timeline earlier this year, the new entrepreneur (ironically repeating age-old Kodak advertisements) touts his new format: as “an important next step to help you tell the story of your life.”

“Effortless abundance” still remains the hope. Only the players and technology have changed. Sometimes, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Eric C. Rodenberg