Kodak "camerosity" date codes
To my friends: My work is done. Why wait?
GE
George Eastman's suicide note
14 March 1932
Above, the Brownie Starmite II.
George Eastman was born in 1854 and during the course of his life popularizing photography and creating Kodak, he became a man of easily held contradictions. After his father died, Eastman was in a precarious financial situation; but by the end of his life had given away well over $100 million. He was, evidently, a fairly easy going and friendly person, but never married. And although he never completed school, he later learned German (and french?) for the sole purpose of being able to read technical articles on photography.
Eastman's life was, to a fault, orderly and almost predictable in hindsight, up to and including his death by his own hand. Accounts of the life of the inventor of roll film tend to be almost panegyric in nature, and many even strike a congratulatory note on his suicide. Quite clearly, he was the rare success story who brought more good to the world than bad and he was regarded, even during his lifetime, as a benevolent captain of industry. But this, perhaps, only hides quirks in his character that would otherwise be highlighted.
(time and money spent on house building, only to have it split and expanded 10 feet, while he insisted on living in it)
But oddities like this are common to those who quickly create a lot of wealth. And another of Eastman's quirks was his endorsement of calendar reform.
Calendar reform may seem foreign to some in the 21st century, but even today different areas and cultures use different calendars, and as recently as 1918 nations were adjusting their calendars to catch up with other parts of the world. But these different calendars and changes, including modern era leap days and leap seconds, are adopted to keep the calendar matching the reality of the earth's seasons and passage around the sun. In contrast, Eastman advocated calendar reform for the sake of orderliness and efficiency, much as its modern-day proponents do.
Eastman heavily promoted the Cotsworth calendar, which consisted of uniform weeks and months, with the result that it had 13 months. This would eliminate unequal months and aid business calculations, Eastman believed. The calendar originated in the 1800s but was so strongly presented by Eastman that it became known in the US as the Eastman Plan, and in fact the International Fixed Calendar League, with offices in London, England, and Rochester, New York (the home of Kodak), was led by Eastman and Moses B. Cotsworth. They closed their doors within 5 years of Eastman's suicide.
Some, but not all Kodak cameras have a manufacturing date stamped or printed on them using a simple code; and some, but not all of these dates, use Cotsworth's 13 month format. Without an enormous inventory of cameras along with factory documentation, it's impossible to say which is the case with each camera. Eastman handed over daily control of Kodak by 1926 and actively took up the cause of calendar reform after that date. He then committed suicide in 1932. To what extent factories followed his preferred calendar system, or how consistently they did so, decades after his death, is not clear.
The camerosity date code worked by replacing numbers with letters as follows:
C A M E R O S I T Y
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
Note that "camerosity" is a nonsense word and doesn't mean anything in particular (unless one believes it was coined from the words camera and curiousity). The date format is MMYY; for example, assuming a 12 month calendar, January 1960 would be YCOY (0160).
Below is a list of the 4-character alphabetical codes I've found on Kodaks, along with the numeric meaning of each code. There seems to be no consistency about the presence of a code, and of course it's impossible in many cases to know if the format follows the 13 month calendar or not.
