page_title: George Eastman
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: George Eastman / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Looking East at en:George Eastman's boyhood home, originally sited in en:Waterville, New York, now located in en:Genesee Country Village and Museum
context_page_description: George Eastman was an American entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and helped to bring the photographic use of roll film into the mainstream. Roll film was also the basis for the invention of motion picture film stock in 1888 by the world's first filmmakers Eadweard Muybridge and Louis Le Prince, and a few years later by their followers Léon Bouly, William Kennedy Dickson, Thomas Edison, the Lumière Brothers, and Georges Méliès.
  He was a major philanthropist, establishing the Eastman School of Music, and schools of dentistry and medicine at the University of Rochester and in London Eastman Dental Hospital; contributing to the Rochester Institute of Technology and the construction of several buildings at the second campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the Charles River. In addition, he made major donations to Tuskegee University and Hampton University, historically black universities in the South. With interests in improving health, he provided funds for clinics in London and other European cities to serve low-income residents.
  In his final two years, Eastman was in intense pain caused by a disorder affecting his spine.
context_section_description: Eastman was born in Waterville, New York as the youngest son of George Washington Eastman and Maria Eastman (née Kilbourn), at the 10-acre farm which his parents had bought in 1849. He had two older sisters, Ellen Maria and Katie. He was largely self-educated, although he attended a private school in Rochester after the age of eight. In the early 1840s his father had started a business school, the Eastman Commercial College in Rochester, New York. The city became one of the first "boomtowns" in the United States, based on rapid industrialization. As his father's health started deteriorating, the family gave up the farm and moved to Rochester in 1860. His father died of a brain disorder in May 1862. To survive and afford George's schooling, his mother took in boarders.
  The second daughter, Katie, had contracted polio when young and died in late 1870 when George was 15 years old. The young George left school early and started working to help support the family. As Eastman began to have success with his photography business, he vowed to repay his mother for the hardships she had endured in raising him.
caption: Eastman's boyhood home from Waterville, now relocated to  the Genesee Country Village and Museum
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