Kodak’s Windsor division integral to global success: Local plant plays critical role in variety of products

He was a high school dropout and not considered particularly gifted academically. But at age 14, he took responsibility seriously and earnestly set about to support his widowed mother and two sisters, one of whom was severely handicapped.
The year was 1869, and George Eastman became an office boy in an insurance company paying $3 a week which could not adequately support his family even then. But Eastman’s ability to overcome adversity and a gift for organization and management helped him to form a photographic plate business which became the multinational Eastman Kodak Co. and today ranks as one of the 25 largest companies in the United States.
Eastman became interested in photography when he was 24 and decided to record a proposed trip with photographs. The equipment of the day included a camera the size of a microwave oven, glass plates, emulsion chemicals, water, a plate holder and other paraphernalia. Eastman was working in a bank at the time, but he became fascinated with photography and was determined to find an easier way to make photographs.
In 1880, Eastman began making dry plates for sale, and in 1888 he introduced the word Kodak with the first Kodak camera. Eastman thought up the word because he liked the letter K and wanted a word that would begin and end with that letter.
Eastman started the company in a little office in Rochester, N.Y., and it is headquartered in Rochester today.
The company has 95,000 employees worldwide and has eight manufacturing plants located in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, England, France, Rochester, N.Y. and Windsor.
It was 100 years after Eastman began his first job at age 14 that the manufacturing plant in Windsor opened, becoming known as the Kodak Colorado Division. Studies in the 1960s showed that Kodak would have to expand its manufacturing capacity for photographic films and papers to keep up the service to customers. Windsor was chosen after a three-year search throughout the Midwest and far West.
“We started the facility here in an old abandoned sugar beet factory,” said Lucille Mantelli, director of community relations and public affairs at Windsor. “There were about five of us, and we started with just a few offices for the purpose of planning the new plant in Windsor. Today, we have 2,200 acres, and we have built on 600 acres. We lease out 1,500 acres for farming, and 400 acres are held as a wildlife refuge. We have developed a watchable wildlife area for the public.”
There are nine major buildings and many smaller service structures on the property, comprising more than 3 million square feet for manufacturing operations. The Windsor facility employs about 2,400 people, and most were hired locally in Colorado, Mantelli said.
Kodak Colorado produces several products and performs a number of functions for the worldwide company. The Kodak distribution center at Windsor ships a significant portion of the products at Kodak Colorado to foreign markets, making it one of the state’s largest exporters.
Colorado is the only Kodak facility to manufacture lithographic plates used on large printing presses for newspapers and magazines. The plates are thin flexible aluminum sheets used by newspapers to photo etch the image of an entire page onto the aluminum plate, which is then wrapped around a roller on a large printing press. The plates are treated with a solution, and the ink will adhere to certain portions of the sheet, making the printed image show up on paper. More than 8,000 varieties of printing plates are manufactured at the Windsor plant to accommodate various press sizes.
The Kodak plant also makes professional motion-picture film largely used in Hollywood by the motion-picture industry.
“We make about 40 percent of the motion-picture film for Kodak,” Mantelli said. “We have won a couple of Oscars for the film we produced here at Windsor.”
The awards were for the quality of the film produced, but Mantelli said she could not remember the names of the movies that received the film awards.
An important ingredient in any type of photographic film is something called plastic support, a transparent flexible material on which the photographic emulsion layer is coated. The plastic support material made at Kodak in Windsor is called Estar, a polyester film material. This material has been developed both as a textile fiber and as plastic sheeting. At the Windsor plant, Kodak uses this material for both graphic arts film and for X-ray film.
“Medical X-ray film comprises the biggest volume of work produced at Windsor,” Mantelli said. “We make a lot of it because it is in such high demand.”
A new product for the Windsor plant, Thermal Media, was developed through new technological advances. Thermal Media is used in Kodak thermal printers.
Typically, these printers are a peripheral device hooked up to a computer. Using several types of software, these printers can duplicate prints from optical scanners, photo CD or other computer images. With this new technology, the thermal process uses dyes transferred from a donor material onto paper by using heat.
Mantelli says the thermal material is like a cellophane ribbon, not quite a foot wide with patches of color, magenta, cyan and yellow dyes on the ribbon, which layers the three colors, one at a time, onto the paper using a heat process.
“This is the third-biggest volume item we produce at Windsor,” she said. “We started thermal up four and a half years ago. This item is really growing. In the next five years, we anticipate our volume to double. This is also a product that is only produced at Windsor.”
Some of the paper for developing color film prints is made at Windsor, and some of the paper made at Kodak’s Rochester mills is shipped to Colorado without emulsions. Light-sensitive emulsions are coated on the paper at Windsor. The primary ingredient in emulsions for film as well as for paper is silver. So far, nothing has been discovered to match silver’s properties to capture light.
Silver is dissolved in boiling nitric acid, the resulting crystals are combined with other chemicals then suspended in a gelatin, liquefied then can be used as a coating on paper and film.
Along with manufacturing, the Windsor plant also does packaging and shipping of several Kodak products that are not manufactured at Windsor. The plant packages the new Advantix camera, which came on the market in February 1996.
“We packaged about eight million Advantix cameras this year,” said John Saurer, general manager and vice president at Windsor. “This camera will revolutionize the photo industry for the amateur and more-advanced camera user. It is really a marriage with silver halide and digital formatted information.”
The new automatic camera sells for $74 to $250 and features a drop-in loading film canister. The film will be returned in its original canister with the prints and a thumbnail size picture of each frame so customers can reorder more prints from the same canister. Customers won’t handle negatives. The canister can also be dropped into a digital reader, which will hook up to a home computer, and the photos can be previewed on a computer screen and sent anywhere in the world or printed out on a home printer.
“The digital reader will be out in 1997,” said Mantelli. “We are doing it in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard. The film for the new Advantix has a magnetic strip on it that records information just like a 3-inch computer disc. So the digital reader will be able to read the strip and create the pictures on a home computer screen.”
Sales revenues for the company are expected to jump with the new Advantix product line. Sales for Eastman Kodak were $14.98 billion in 1995. Net earnings that year were $1.25 billion.
In 1994, Eastman divested a number of non-imaging businesses, including pharmaceutical and consumer health businesses, in order to concentrate on their core business. Consumer imaging sales grew by 12 percent in 1994 and 15 percent in 1995. Return on net assets grew from 16.7 percent in 1994 to 22.2 percent in 1995 and are expected to reach higher levels in 1996.
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