George Eastman's primary goal was to simplify the photographic process and reduce the amount of gear, time, and effort needed to take a picture. When he first set this goal, photographers had to go through a complicated process. A glass plate had to be coated with a liquid emulsion just moments before the picture was to be taken. Then, once the exposure was made, the picture had to be developed immediately. This required having a mobile darkroom to accommodate all the chemicals and paraphernalia right on the site where the pictures were to be taken.

Eastman, along with collaborators, first developed a dry, pre-coated plate that could be used in much the same way as the wet one, but with the convenience of being already prepared for exposure for the picture taking. However, in order to use a small camera that would not need a tripod, he worked to produce a dry, transparent, flexible film and a small camera to use it. The film he developed took pictures in black and white. He used paper as a light and flexible support for the needed emulsion. He coated the paper with layers of a soluble gelatin followed by layers of insoluble, light-sensitive gelatin.

The layers of gelatin had different roles to play in the making of a photograph. Some filtered light or controlled the chemical reactions that took place. Others, that made the actual image, contained silver-halide crystals, which underwent a photochemical reaction when exposed to light through the camera lens and thus captured the photographic image. Once the film was exposed, it was developed using chemicals that broke down the crystals into silver, enhancing the image. Another chemical was then used to halt the light sensitivity of the film and to set the negative image so that a picture could be printed.

This new flexible film, mounted on a spool, needed a new kind of camera, and Eastman invented the Kodak camera. A rectangular box with a fixed-focus lens, his camera could hold the spool of film and a take-up spool that allowed as many as one hundred exposures to be made without the need to unload or reload the camera.

These two inventions took photography out of the exclusive purview of professional photographers and introduced it to the masses as a way to record and save precious memories. They also opened up a new and lucrative business that made millionaires of Eastman and his associates. A direct by-product of Eastman's work was the development of the motion-picture industry, which owes much to Eastman's invention of transparent roll film.

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