B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

Two of the world’s better-known brands, both of them involved in one way or another with making or manipulating images, have their roots in the same obscure city in upstate New York. Both have a five-letter name. In each case, it begins and ends with the same letter. They have been enormously successful, and have had as important a part to play in the creation of some of the key artefacts in the history of industrial design as any designer. Their histories have many parallels, but it is the differences between them that are more revealing. One survived, the other didn’t. It is the continuing longevity of some manufacturers that says as much about the rise and fall of others.

Neither Kodak nor Xerox, its slightly younger neighbour, still have the name that they were born with. Kodak was once called the Eastman Dry Plate Company; a name that came from its founder, George Eastman. Xerox began life fifteen years later in 1906 as the Haloid Photographic Company. Both companies spent their defining years in upstate New York, in Rochester, a city of less than 250,000 people that could be seen as the definitive location of the back of beyond. They have left behind the two dominant structures on Rochester’s skyline. Kodak’s Gothic skyscraper is the more imposing and distinctive of the two, and reflects the earlier peak in its fortunes. Xerox built its anaemic glass box much later, in the 1960s, and moved out of the state almost immediately afterwards.

Kodak, which eventually took to calling itself Eastman Kodak, is little more than a flickering afterglow of the swaggering corporate giant that it once was. Its ubiquitous yellow boxes and its envelopes, with their contrasting red logo designed to draw attention to its products, are fading from memory. After seeking protection from its creditors, its best asset now is its patent armoury. It offers its owners the chance to challenge more successful companies for alleged infringements of its intellectual property. This is more valuable than its ability to make or sell things; another manifestation of capitalism in its decadent phase, like the stock market trades that no longer use capital to invest in productive industry, but simply deploy it to bet against the fluctuations of the market index.

Kodak was once among the most successful and innovative businesses in the world, employing 140,000 people. It had a virtual monopoly on the manufacture and processing of film for decades, until Fuji from Japan was finally able to mount a serious challenge. When George Eastman introduced the first Kodak camera in 1900, he was setting a path that Steve Jobs and Apple would one day follow. He transformed the loading and exposure of film from a chemical experiment into a simple purchase. He invented photography for the masses. Eastman took processing exposed film, and printing of the result, out of the hands photographer. He turned photography from a special interest into a universal pastime, and Kodak was able to charge for both the service and the products it offered. ‘Pull the cord, turn the key, press the button, and for another 100 pictures, we do the rest’ was the sales pitch in the early days.

Kodak made its mark on hardware too by designing and manufacturing its own cameras. The box Brownie was one of the most characteristic objects of its time, going through successive facelifts to culminate in a die-cast, vaguely art deco form designed by Walter Dorwin Teague. Much later came the Instamatic, launched in 1963, with its compact rectangular format, its brushed metal and chrome case, and its cassette-format film for idiot-proof ease of loading. In car-styling terms, it was the shift away from tail fins, or from the Morris Minor, to the modernity of the Mini, which took place at exactly the same time.

I was too young to drive a car, but I was thrilled to get an Instamatic as a Christmas present the year that it was launched in Britain. It was the first self-consciously modern object that I had ever touched. For a while, it was perhaps the only such possession in a house in which, hot water for the bath came from an Ascot gas heater, and which had no refrigerator. It was joined a few years later by the mustard-yellow streamlined 1960s version of the Anglepoise desk lamp with its sculpted shade. Hanging from the spring-loaded arm was a little black-and-white triangle that carried the words ‘Selected for the Design Centre’. I bought it myself with the money I got as a reward for passing all eight of my O levels. And shortly afterwards I acquired a Sony cassette tape player. It had a brushed aluminium body, with a racy-looking chamfered edge for the piano-key controls, and a businesslike needle displaying what might just as well have been frequency response as battery life. I knew it was important because all the other cassette players had plastic bodies and looked years behind in styling terms. All three objects were important to me, but it was Kodak’s Instamatic that really made me understand what an object might be trying to say about itself.

Kodak was always ahead of the pack in those days, just as it had been a decade earlier when my two older brothers came back from America with samples of a phenomenon still entirely unknown in Britain: colour prints. When the first Instamatic 100 came out Sony was still at the bargain-basement stage; turning out cheesy lookalikes of original American and German products. Samsung was more interested in its insurance business than in making consumer electronics, as South Koreans patched up their country from the devastating war that had ended barely a decade earlier.

Despite the seductive nature of the Instamatic, the real money in photography for Kodak was in the processing, not the hardware. In the same way Gillette sells blades and gives its razors away, and mobile phone companies subsidize phones in order to sign up subscribers for its premium tariffs. The cameras may have looked different, and been slightly easier to use, but there was no substantial technological shift or change in the business model in seventy years.

Kodak moved beyond print film into colour transparencies, and then came up with a spin-off brand, Kodachrome. For a while it seemed like the definitive view of modernity, before it too was overtaken by the great digital revolution. Slide film opened up a new way of talking to groups of people that went a few steps beyond the magic-lantern lecture of the early days of the twentieth century. The invention of the carousel slide projector allowed for multi-screen projections of the kind pioneered by Charles and Ray Eames, and which foreshadowed PowerPoint as the presentational tool of choice. I have boxes and boxes of slides, mounted in little cardboard sleeves, each carrying the Kodak logo and a date stamp recording the month and year that they were processed: I have not looked at them in a quarter of a century. They belong to a world seemingly as far distant as gas lamps and pianola rolls and all the other countless victims of the mass extinctions of once promising technologies that never reached their full potential before the end of the analogue age.

At its peak, in 1997, just before sales of film fell off a cliff, the company was valued at $30 billion. Fifteen years later, Kodak was bankrupt. The company had seen digital photography coming. It built Apple’s QuickTake, launched in 1994, which was one of the first digital cameras aimed at a general audience, even if the price when it first went on sale was $750. But when images are stored as random collections of pixels, rather than on silver and paper, the technical expertise in chemistry and the distribution system it had built up over decades were no longer relevant. There was very little that Kodak could offer Apple. Once digital photography took firm hold, Kodak’s income collapsed, threatening the company’s survival.

The end was shockingly rapid. In 2000, the US bought 950 million rolls of film, most of it from Kodak. Ten years later, the total was less than 100 million. Analogue camera sales, which peaked in 2000 at twenty million, are now too small to be a visible segment of the market. It had taken just seven years for digital cameras to go from zero to overtake analogue camera sales in 2003. To judge by its share price at the end of 2011 Kodak was worth just $265 million. At the beginning of 2012 its brand was described as worthless.

Despite having its roots in a closely related product category, Xerox has done much better over the years. It has maintained its grip by understanding what customers will pay for, not by focusing on the things that it already knows how to do. The technology of copying has played a crucial part in the evolution of industrial design. It was Raymond Loewy’s restyling of the Gestetner duplicator that brought the seductive qualities of consumer objects to business machines for perhaps the first time. Having one in the 1930s was as much the mark of an ambitious company wanting to establish its forward-looking business as a citrus-coloured iMac was in the 1990s. The Xerox Corporation went further than simply re-skinning an object; it reinvented the process of copying.

In its days as Haloid, Xerox had grown slowly, specializing in photographic papers. Its entry into the copying market was to have an enormous impact on the way that offices work. Copying, filing and storing paper is the underpinning of every bureaucracy in the world: the source of the paper trail. Xerox came to dominate it gradually. Initially it secured the rights to the Photostat process, essentially a means of photographing documents, which it licensed to Kodak. Then Chester Carlson, an inventor, scientist and patent lawyer who had been hawking his idea of a copying system to all-comers, came to Haloid. It took the best part of twenty years’ work to bring it to the market, but when the Xerox 914 was launched in 1959 it was a massive success. Previous copying methods used messy ink. The Xerox systems worked with electrically charged dry powder. They made modern bureaucracy possible, but they also provided a generation of radical students with the means to put across their political message, which is why the dictatorships in Latin America and the Warsaw Pact were so anxious to keep them under lock and key.

When the Xerox 914 turned into a runaway success the Haloid Company renamed itself after its new product, just as Eastman had done. After the copier, Xerox targeted the duplicating process: not quite as fast as printing, but cheaper and simpler. Now it is promoting itself as a publisher of technical manuals, and as a manager of call centres, rather than simply a supplier of photocopying machines. One day paper may no longer be involved, but Xerox plans to continue finding ways of doing the things that photocopying once did for its customers, whatever the media or the means.

Kodak did have products aimed at business, but most of its effort concentrated on the domestic consumer; Xerox dominated the workplace. One looked disaster in the eye and then blinked, the other moved its headquarters to a rather more welcoming environment and survived. Xerox moved its HQ to Connecticut, and set up a research centre at Palo Alto in California, which helped give it the perspective it needed to see beyond the things it already knew about making photocopiers, and to understand what new technologies might mean for them. Kodak went from unquestioned world leadership to oblivion as it found it impossible to adjust to the impact of digitalization. It was a business that made its money selling film, and it could not adjust quickly enough when nobody wanted to buy any.

Xerox had always invested heavily in research. It was working out how to connect its copying machines with copper telephone lines in the early 1960s. It focused not on copying but on information itself; on storing and transmitting it. Xerox’s scientists put all the elements of the forerunner of the personal computer together, with a QWERTY keyboard, a cathode ray screen, the graphic user interface and the first usable mouse. Xerox was shrewd enough to understand that it had to see itself as a business rooted not in any one technology. It gave a number of remarkably gifted researchers the resources to pursue a whole range of far-sighted technologies, many of which it never made use of itself. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, he recounts a confrontation between Jobs and Bill Gates in the 1980s when Microsoft launched Windows. For Jobs, the Windows click-and-point icons and mouse graphic user interface were nothing less than theft. ‘You are ripping us off. I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us.’ Gates kept his temper. ‘Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal the TV set, and found out that you had already stolen it’.

The longevity and sheer ubiquity of Kodak and Xerox, both names which have involved a certain amount of artifice, demonstrate that not all fabricated identities are manipulative or pretentious.

Xerox, though it might sound like a random generation of vowels and consonants, actually has a plausible source. It comes from the Greek words for ‘dry’, xeros, and for ‘writing’, graphia, put together by Chester Carlson to name his process Xeroxography.

Kodak is a name that has its origins in George Eastman’s passion for the letter k. It was the first letter of his mother’s name. But as he wrote to the British patent office in 1888 when he filed the name Kodak, ‘This is not a foreign name, or a word. It was constructed by me, to serve a definitive purpose. It has the following merits. It is short. It is not capable of mispronunciation. It does not resemble anything else in the art.’

Branding has been the snake oil of the post-industrial world. A complex network of businesses has been built on the idea of the value of the intangible, of a name, an identity, of an idea of what a business might be. Yet as Kodak and Xerox demonstrate so clearly, it is not the image of either name that is valuable, it is what it is able, somewhat more tangibly, to offer.