Kodak no. 1' box camera

George Eastman launched this pocket camera in the United States in 1888. The ‘Kodak’ box camera had a shutter and was loaded with flexible film enabling the user to take some hundred photographs. It was childishly simple to use (‘You press the button, we do the rest’), consisting of three movements: pulling the cord to cock the shutter, turning the key to wind the next length of unexposed film in front of the lens, then pressing the shutter release. But the user still had to frame the subject and maintain the camera perfectly still for the photograph. Paul Nadar, the Kodak Company’s agent in Paris, made the laboratory of the Office Général de Photographie available to the public for developing pictures and reloading the camera. The director of the American Museum of Photography in Philadelphia donated this camera in 1962.