When we invent something, we go to the patent office. When we work out how to sell it, we go to the trademark office. We may even do the second, first. Not so George Eastman. On 4 September 1888, he made two applications. The first was to patent his camera. The second was to trademark what he wanted to call it. That shows foresight and confidence.
By the bye, Linda McCartney was not an Eastman: she was a photographer who used Kodak film; her entertainment lawyer father Lee Eastman was born Leopold Vail Epstein; and his father had been born in Russia about a year before George’s big leap forward.
Eastman’s film enabled Thomas Edison to perfect the kineoscope, which in turn became the motion picture. Hollywood is in Los Angeles, or is that El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, the town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels, founded by 44 hardy Spaniards on 4 September 1781.
Whether Hollywood will suffer the fate of Eastman Kodak is yet to be seen; whatever happens will happen because of the rise of the modern behemoths like Google, founded on 4 September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
