On September 4, 1888, George Eastman received US patent 388,850 for his roll-film box camera and registered the trademark Kodak, number 15,825, tying a name and a machine together on the same day. Both went on to define the photography business for a century.
The camera held a hundred exposures and cost 25 dollars. It had a fixed focus and no viewfinder worth the name. What made the Kodak a business rather than a gadget was the system built around it, in which the buyer took a hundred pictures, mailed the entire camera back to Rochester with ten dollars, and received prints, a fresh roll of film and the camera itself. The advertising line told customers that the company did the rest.
Eastman had built toward this in steps. He patented a dry plate formula in 1879 and founded the Eastman Dry Plate Company in 1881, then replaced fragile glass plates with a paper-based roll film in 1884 and later with celluloid. He picked the word himself. He liked the letter K. He insisted the name be short, hard to mispronounce, and tied to nothing else.
The effect was to take photography out of the hands of people willing to carry glass plates, chemicals and a darkroom tent. Sales followed. By 1896 about 100,000 Kodak cameras had been sold. The company became the Eastman Kodak Company in 1892, and the Brownie, sold from 1900 at a dollar, put cameras in the hands of children.