[4] Under Eastman's direction, the company became one of the world's largest film and camera manufacturers, and also developed a model of welfare capitalism and a close relationship with the city of Rochester.

[8][9] The company's ubiquity was such that its "Kodak moment" tagline entered the common lexicon to describe a personal event that deserved to be recorded for posterity.

[33] Eastman's advertising slogan, "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest", soon entered the public lexicon, and was referenced by Chauncey Depew in a speech[33] and Gilbert and Sullivan in their opera Utopia, Limited.

[52] Many other employers in the Rochester area took cues from Kodak and increased their own wages and benefits in order to remain competitive in the labor market.

[59] From 1931 to 1936, Kodak participated in the Rochester Plan, a privately funded unemployment insurance program to assist the jobless and boost consumer spending.

The program was created by Marion Folsom, who gained national recognition for his work and would later serve as a company director and cabinet secretary for Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The company produced film, cameras, microfilm, pontoons, synthetic fibers, RDX, variable-time fuses, and hand grenades for the government.

Kodak AG, the German subsidiary, was transferred to two trustees in 1941 to allow the company to continue operating in the event of war between Germany and the United States.

[66] After a 1943 meeting between Kenneth Mees and Leslie Groves, a team of Kodak scientists joined the Manhattan Project and enriched uranium-235 at Oak Ridge.

The source of the radiation was eventually traced to strawboard packaging from Vincennes, Indiana, which had been irradiated by fallout that had traveled thousands of miles northeast from the Trinity test site.

[69] In 1951, the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began providing Kodak with a schedule of nuclear tests in exchange for its silence after the company threatened to sue the federal government for damage caused to film products.

[79] Between 1963 and 1970, Kodak engineers worked on the cancelled Manned Orbiting Laboratory program, designing optical sensors for a crewed reconnaissance satellite.

[115][116] Despite the initial high growth in sales, digital cameras had low profit margins due to strong competition,[114][117] and the market rapidly matured.

[124] In 2009, Kodak announced that it would cease selling Kodachrome color film, ending 74 years of production, after a dramatic decline in sales.

[128] In 2011, these new lines of inkjet printers were said to be on verge of turning a profit, although some analysts were skeptical as printouts had been replaced gradually by electronic copies on computers, tablets, and smartphones.

[130] A number of divisions were sold off to repay debts from previous investments, most notably the Kodak Health Group, one of the company's profitable units.

[130] By January 2012, analysts suggested that the company could enter bankruptcy followed by an auction of its patents, as it was reported to be in talks with Citigroup to provide debtor-in-possession financing.

[15][138] This was confirmed on January 19, 2012, when the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and obtained a $950 million, 18-month credit facility from Citigroup to enable it to continue operations.

[140][141] During bankruptcy proceedings, Kodak sold many of its patents for approximately $525 million to a group of companies (including Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, Adobe Systems, and HTC) under the names Intellectual Ventures and RPX Corporation.

[182] The company currently has partnerships with touch-panel producers for functional printing, including ones with UniPixel announced on April 16, 2013, and Kingsbury Corp. launched on June 27, 2013.

[187]The Kodak brand is licensed to several consumer products produced by other companies, such as the PIXPRO line of digital cameras manufactured by JK Imaging.

Kodak extensively studied customer behavior, finding that women in particular enjoyed taking digital photos but were frustrated by the difficulty in moving them to their computers.

One of their key innovations was a printer dock which allowed consumers to insert their cameras into a compact device and print photos with the press of a button.

[225] Kodak chemists Ching Wan Tang and Steven Van Slyke created the first practical organic light-emitting diode (OLED) in 1987.

[249] Kodak also sold Pro-Tek Media Preservation Services, a film storage company in Burbank, California, to LAC Group in October 2013.

The organization protested Kodak and successfully negotiated an agreement with the company to hire 600 African-American workers through a job training program in 1967.

Their cooperative partnership came to an end in the late 1960s, when Polaroid pursued independent production of its film and Kodak expressed an interest in developing its own instant camera, bringing them into direct competition.

[292] In a 2014 settlement with the EPA, Kodak provided $49 million to clean up pollution it had caused in the Genesee River and at superfund sites in New York and New Jersey.

[295] On July 28, 2020, the Trump administration announced that it planned to give Kodak a $765 million loan for manufacturing ingredients used in pharmaceuticals, to rebuild the national stockpile depleted by the COVID-19 pandemic and reduce dependency on foreign factories.

[298] The New York Times reported that one day before the White House announced the loan, Kodak CEO Jim Continenza was given 1.75 million stock options, some of which he was able to execute immediately.