Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Kodak trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Kodak trivia quiz covers the company that put a camera in everyone's hands and then missed the digital future it had invented. The easy questions are the ones any photographer knows: the founder, the city, the slogan, the famous slide film and the camera named after storybook sprites. From there it moves into how the name was made up with an Anagrams set, the $25 camera you mailed back for processing, and the welfare capitalism that made Rochester a company town. The harder end is for photography buffs and business-history readers: the Manhattan Project chemists, the fogged X-ray film that revealed nuclear fallout, the U-2 spy-plane cameras, the 1975 digital camera that recorded to cassette tape, the Sterling Drug misstep, the price war with Fujifilm, the Olympics contract that changed everything, the last roll of Kodachrome, the patents sold to Apple and Google, and the cryptocurrency nobody asked for. The Oscars theatre, the Rochester tower and Paul Simon get questions too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the company, its founder and its products before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our photography, Polaroid and famous inventors quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who founded the company that became Kodak?
George Eastman
He went into partnership with Henry Strong in 1880 to found the Eastman Dry Plate Company.
Q 02In which New York city is Kodak headquartered?
Rochester
The company's decline hit the city hard, with lost Kodak GDP cancelling out growth in every other sector from 2007 to 2018.
Q 03How did the founder come up with the name Kodak?
He invented it with an Anagrams set
He said it should be short, easy to pronounce and unlike any other name; K was his favourite letter.
Q 04Which letter did Eastman call a strong, incisive sort of letter?
K
The Kodak name was trademarked in 1888.
Q 05How much did the original 1888 Kodak camera cost, pre-loaded with 100 exposures?
$25
Owners mailed it back to Rochester with $10 to have the film developed and a new roll fitted.
Q 06What was Eastman's famous slogan for the first Kodak camera?
You press the button, we do the rest
Gilbert and Sullivan referenced it in their opera Utopia, Limited.
Q 07The Kodak camera of 1888 had no viewfinder; what helped users aim it?
Two V-shaped silhouettes
A rotating key advanced the film and a pull-string set the shutter.
Q 08What business model did Kodak follow, selling cheap cameras to profit from film?
Razor and blades
Eastman recognised that film would return more profit than the cameras that used it.
Q 09Whom did Kodak's early Kodak Girl advertising target?
Young, white, middle-class women
Eastman focused on control of the film market rather than cameras.
Q 10In which year was Eastman Kodak incorporated?
1892
The Eastman Dry Plate Company had been founded on 1 January 1881.
Q 11What was the initial price of the Brownie camera, launched in 1900?
$1
It introduced the snapshot to the masses and surpassed its marketing goal.
Q 12After what was the Brownie camera named?
Storybook characters by Palmer Cox
Frank A. Brownell designed it, and it was initially aimed at children.
Q 13In which year were the first Instamatic cameras sold?
1963
They were Kodak's lowest-cost cameras to date and used easy-load 126 cartridges.
Q 14Which two easy-load film cartridge formats did Instamatic cameras use?
Q 21How long did the 1975 Kodak digital prototype take to record each image to cassette tape?
Twenty-three seconds
Its sensor captured just 0.01 megapixels.
Q 22What RGB sensor arrangement, used in almost every digital camera, did Kodak patent in the 1970s?
The Bayer filter
Kodak also published important research in dye lasers that decade.
Q 23What was established at Building 3 of Kodak Park in 1912?
The Research Laboratories
Kenneth Mees was its first director, focusing on colour photography and radiography.
110 and 126
The X-15F was the last Instamatic sold in the US, staying on sale until 1988.
Q 15In which year was the three-colour Kodachrome film launched?
1935
It was invented at Kodak Research Laboratories by musicians Leopold Godowsky Jr. and Leopold Mannes.
Q 16Which two men, both musicians, invented the commercially viable Kodachrome?
Godowsky and Mannes
An earlier two-colour Kodachrome had been sold from 1915.
Q 17In which year did Kodak announce the end of Kodachrome after 74 years?
2009
Sales had declined dramatically as digital took over.
Q 18Which Kansas lab developed the world's last roll of Kodachrome in 2010?
Dwayne's
The last roll was shot by National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry.
Q 19Which singer-songwriter had a 1973 hit titled Kodachrome?
Paul Simon
A Utah state park named Kodachrome Basin is the only park named for a brand of film.
Q 20Which Kodak engineer built the first self-contained digital camera prototype in 1975?
Steven Sasson
It weighed 8 pounds, used a 100 by 100 pixel CCD and recorded to cassette tape.
Q 24How did the company's founder die in 1932?
By suicide
His health had been declining; the note he left is famous for its brevity.
Q 25Which musical institution did Kodak's founder establish in his home city?
The Eastman School of Music
He also established the Rochester Philharmonic and dental hospitals in Rochester and London.
Q 26Which Kodak statistician created a Depression-era unemployment plan and later joined Eisenhower's cabinet?
Marion Folsom
He also pushed Kodak to offer life insurance and retirement annuities in 1928.
Q 27Which future instant-camera pioneer supplied Kodak with polarised lenses from 1934?
Edwin Land
Kodak briefly considered buying his patents; he later founded Polaroid.
Q 28What did Kodak scientists do for the Manhattan Project after a 1943 meeting with Leslie Groves?
Enriched uranium-235 at Oak Ridge
Kodak also made RDX, variable-time fuses and hand grenades for the war effort.
Q 29What mysteriously fogged a batch of Kodak X-ray film in 1945?
Fallout from the Trinity nuclear test
It had contaminated strawboard packaging made in Vincennes, Indiana, thousands of miles away.
Q 30What did the Atomic Energy Commission start giving Kodak in 1951?
A schedule of nuclear tests
The deal bought Kodak's silence after it threatened to sue the government over damaged film.