• Inventor and Businessman George Eastman, 1854
• Physicist and Inventor Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann, 1845

He was a major philanthropist, establishing the Eastman School of Music, and schools of dentistry and medicine at the University of Rochester; contributing to the construction of MIT's second campus on the Charles River; and donating to Tuskegee and Hampton universities. In addition, he provided funds for clinics in London and other European cities to serve low income residents.

The George Eastman House, now operated as the International Museum of Photography and Film, has been designated a National Historic Landmark.

Eastman was born in Waterville, New York, to George Washington Eastman and Maria Eastman (née Kilbourn), the youngest child, at the 10 acre farm which his parents 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. His father had started a business school, the Eastman Commercial College in the early 1840s in Rochester, New York, described as one of the first "boomtowns" in the United States, with a rapid growth in industry. 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. Her second daughter Katie had contracted polio when young and died in late 1870. The young Eastman left school early and started working.

In 1884, Eastman patented the first film in roll form to prove practicable; he had been tinkering at home to develop it. In 1888 he perfected the Kodak camera, the first camera designed specifically for roll film. In 1892, he established the Eastman Kodak Company, in Rochester, New York. It was one of the first firms to mass produce standardized photography equipment. The company also manufactured the flexible transparent film, devised by Eastman in 1889, which proved vital to the subsequent development of the motion picture industry.

He started his philanthropy early, sharing the income from his business to establish educational and health institutions. Notable among his contributions were a $625,000 gift in 1901 to the Mechanics Institute, now Rochester Institute of Technology; and a major gift in the early 1900s to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which enabled the construction of buildings on its second campus by the Charles River. It opened this campus in 1916.

Eastman was associated with Kodak company in an administrative and an executive capacity until his death; he contributed much to the development of its notable research facilities. In 1911 he founded the Eastman Trust and Savings Bank. While discouraging the formation of unions at his manufacturing plant, he established paternal systems of support for his employees.

He was one of the outstanding philanthropists of his time, donating more than $100 million to various projects in Rochester; Cambridge, Massachusetts; at two historically black colleges in the South; and in several European cities. In 1918, he endowed the establishment of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, and in 1921 a school of medicine and dentistry there.

In 1925, Eastman gave up his daily management of Kodak to become treasurer. He concentrated on philanthropic activities, to which he had already donated substantial sums. For example, he donated funds to establish the Eastman Dental Dispensary in 1916. He was one of the major philanthropists of his time, ranking only slightly behind Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and a few others, but did not seek publicity for his activities. He concentrated on institution building and causes that could help people's health. From 1925 until his death, Eastman donated $ 10,000 per year to the American Eugenics Society.

In his final two years, Eastman was in intense pain, caused by a degenerative disorder affecting his spine. He had trouble standing and his walking became a slow shuffle. Today it might be diagnosed as lumbar spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal canal caused by calcification in the vertebrae. Eastman grew depressed, as he had seen his mother spend the last two years of her life in a wheelchair from the same condition. On March 14, 1932, Eastman died by suicide with a single gunshot to the heart, leaving a note which read, "To my friends: my work is done. Why wait?"

His funeral was held at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Rochester; he was buried on the grounds of the company he founded at Kodak Park in Rochester, New York.

During his lifetime Eastman donated $100 million to various organizations but most of the money went to the University of Rochester and to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (under the alias "Mr. Smith"). The Rochester Institute of Technology has a building dedicated to Eastman, in recognition of his support and substantial donations. In recognition of his donation to MIT, the university installed a plaque of Eastman (students rub the nose on the plaque for good luck.) Eastman also made substantial gifts to the Tuskegee Institute and the Hampton Institute. Upon his death, his entire estate went to the University of Rochester, where his name can be found on the Eastman Quadrangle of the River Campus. The auditorium at Mississippi State Universities Dave C. Swalm School of Chemical Engineering is named for Eastman in recognition of his inspiration to Swalm.

His former home at 900 East Avenue in Rochester, New York, was opened as the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in 1949. It has been designated a National Historic Landmark. In 1954, the 100th anniversary of his birth, Eastman was honored with a postage stamp from the United States Post Office. In the fall of 2009, a statue of Eastman was erected on the Eastman Quad of the University of Rochester.

In 1915, Eastman founded a bureau of municipal research in Rochester "to get things done for the community" and to serve as an "independent, non - partisan agency for keeping citizens informed." Called the Center for Governmental Research, the agency continues to carry out that mission.

Eastman had a very astute business sense. He focused his company on making film when competition heated up in the camera industry. By providing quality and affordable film to every camera manufacturer, Kodak managed to turn its competitors into de facto business partners.

In 1926, George Eastman was approached by Lord Riddell, the Chairman of Royal Free Hospital, to fund a dental clinic in London. He agreed to give £200,000, which was matched by £50,000 each from Lord Riddell and Sir Albert Levy, the Royal Free's honorary treasurer. The Eastman Dental Clinic was opened on November 20, 1931, by the American Ambassador in the presence of Neville Chamberlain. The building, which resembled the Rochester Dispensary, was totally integrated into the Royal Free Hospital and included three wards for oral, otolaryngology and cleft lip and palate surgery. It was dedicated to providing dental care for children from the poor districts of central London. In a similar manner, Eastman went on to establish dental clinics in Rome, Paris, Brussels and Stockholm.

One of Lippmann's early discoveries was the relationship between electrical and capillary phenomena which allowed him to develop a sensitive capillary electrometer, subsequently known as the Lippmann electrometer which was used in the first ECG machine. In a paper delivered to the Philosophical Society of Glasgow on 17 January 1883, John G. M'Kendrick described the apparatus as follows:

Lippmann's electrometer consists of a tube of ordinary glass, 1 metre long and 7 millimetres in diameter, open at both ends, and kept in the vertical position by a stout support. The lower end is drawn into a capillary point, until the diameter of the capillary is .005 of a millimetre. The tube is filled with mercury, and the capillary point is immersed in dilute sulphuric acid (1 to 6 of water in volume), and in the bottom of the vessel containing the acid there is a little more mercury. A platinum wire is put into connection with the mercury in each tube, and, finally, arrangements are made by which the capillary point can be seen with a microscope magnifying 250 diameters. Such an instrument is very sensitive; and Lippmann states that it is possible to determine a difference of potential so small as that of one 10,080th of a Daniell. It is thus a very delicate means of observing and (as it can be graduated by a compensation - method) of measuring minute electromotive forces.

Lippmann's PhD thesis, presented to the Sorbonne on 24 July 1875, was on electrocapillarity.

Above all, Lippmann is remembered as the inventor of a method for reproducing colors by photography, based on the interference phenomenon, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1908.

In 1886, Lippmann's interest turned to a method of fixing the colors of the solar spectrum on a photographic plate. On 2 February 1891, he announced to the Academy of Sciences: "I have succeeded in obtaining the image of the spectrum with its colors on a photographic plate whereby the image remains fixed and can remain in daylight without deterioration." By April 1892, he was able to report that he had succeeded in producing color images of a stained glass window, a group of flags, a bowl of oranges topped by a red poppy and a multicolored parrot. He presented his theory of color photography using the interference method in two papers to the Academy, one in 1894, the other in 1906.

The interference phenomenon in optics occurs as a result of the wave propagation of light. When light of a given wavelength is reflected back upon itself by a mirror, standing waves are generated, much as the ripples resulting from a stone dropped into still water create standing waves when reflected back by a surface such as the wall of a pool. In the case of ordinary incoherent light, the standing waves are distinct only within a microscopically thin volume of space next to the reflecting surface.

Lippmann made use of this phenomenon by projecting an image onto a special photographic plate capable of recording detail smaller than the wavelengths of visible light. The light passed through the supporting glass sheet into a very thin and nearly transparent photographic emulsion containing submicroscopically small silver halide grains. A temporary mirror of liquid mercury in intimate contact reflected the light back through the emulsion, creating standing waves whose nodes had little effect while their antinodes created a latent image. After development, the result was a structure of laminae, distinct parallel layers composed of submicroscopic metallic silver grains, which was a permanent record of the standing waves. In each part of the image, the spacing of the laminae corresponded to the wavelengths of the light photographed.

The finished plate was illuminated from the front at a nearly perpendicular angle, using daylight or another source of white light containing the full range of wavelengths in the visible spectrum. At each point on the plate, light of approximately the same wavelength as the light which had generated the laminae was strongly reflected back toward the viewer. Light of other wavelengths which was not absorbed or scattered by the silver grains simply passed through the emulsion, usually to be absorbed by a black anti - reflection coating applied to the back of the plate after it had been developed. The wavelengths, and therefore the colors, of the light which had formed the original image were thus reconstituted and a full color image was seen.

The Lippmann process was not easy to use in practice. Extremely fine grained high resolution photographic emulsions are inherently much less light sensitive than ordinary emulsions, so long exposure times were required. With a lens of large aperture and a very brightly sunlit subject, a camera exposure of less than one minute was sometimes possible, but exposures measured in minutes were typical. Pure spectral colors reproduced brilliantly, but the ill defined broad bands of wavelengths reflected by real world objects could be problematic. The process did not produce color prints on paper and it proved impossible to make a good duplicate of a Lippmann color photograph by rephotographing it, so each image was unique. A very shallow angled prism was usually cemented to the front of the finished plate to deflect unwanted surface reflections, and this made plates of any substantial size impractical. The lighting and viewing arrangement required to see the colors to best effect precluded casual use. Although the special plates and a plate holder with a built in mercury reservoir were commercially available for a few years circa 1900, even expert users found consistent good results elusive and the process never graduated from being a scientifically elegant laboratory curiosity. It did, however, stimulate interest in the further development of color photography.

Lippmann's process foreshadowed laser holography, which is also based on recording standing waves in a photographic medium. Denisyuk reflection holograms, often referred to as Lippmann - Bragg holograms, have similar laminar structures that preferentially reflect certain wavelengths. In the case of actual multiple wavelength color holograms of this type, the color information is recorded and reproduced just as in the Lippmann process, except that the highly coherent laser light passing through the recording medium and reflected back from the subject generates the required distinct standing waves throughout a relatively large volume of space, eliminating the need for reflection to occur immediately adjacent to the recording medium. Unlike Lippmann color photography, however, the lasers, the subject and the recording medium must all be kept stable to within one quarter of a wavelength during the exposure in order for the standing waves to be recorded adequately or at all.

In 1908, Lippmann introduced integral photography, in which a plane array of closely spaced small lenses is used to photograph a scene, recording images of the scene as it appears from many slightly different horizontal and vertical locations. When the resulting images are rectified and viewed through a similar array of lenses, a single integrated image, composed of small portions of all the images, is seen by each eye. The position of the eye determines which parts of the small images it sees. The effect is that the visual geometry of the original scene is reconstructed, so that the limits of the array seem to be the edges of a window through which the scene appears life size and in three dimensions, realistically exhibiting parallax and perspective shift with any change in the position of the observer.

In 1895, Lippmann evolved a method of eliminating the personal equation in measurements of time, using photographic registration, and he studied the eradication of irregularities of pendulum clocks, devising a method of comparing the times of oscillation of two pendulums of nearly equal period.

Lippmann also invented the coelostat, an astronomical tool that compensated for the Earth's rotation and allowed a region of the sky to be photographed without apparent movement.

Lippmann was a member of the Academy of Sciences from 8 February 1886 until his death, serving as its President in 1912. In addition, he was a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London, a member of the Bureau des Longitudes, and a member of the Grand Ducal Institute. He became a member of the Société française de photographie in 1892 and its president from 1896 to 1899. Lippmann was one of the founders of the Institut d'optique théorique et appliquée in France.

Lippmann married the daughter of the novelist Victor Cherbuliez in 1888. He died on 13 July 1921 aboard the steamer France while en route from Canada.