ROCHESTER, N.Y. — In an age of iPhones, Instagram and selfies, where everyone has a camera, it’s a history lesson of sorts to go back to a time when pictures weren’t pixels and cameras didn’t double as telephones and music players.

That time is captured vividly in the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, which was known for a century as “the Snapshot City.”

If the name Eastman doesn’t ring a bell, try this one: Kodak. Entrepreneur George Eastman invented the word for his cameras and film, and for a century the products he manufactured here led the world in photography.

Now Kodak is a shadow of its former self. It missed the boat when the industry went digital, and its work force has dropped from 60,000 in the 1980s to around 2,000 today. But its glory days are recalled in a marvellous museum at the George Eastman House estate.

The thousands of items on display — and there are 400,000 more in the vaults — tell the story not just of Kodak but the whole history of photography, from August 19, 1839.

A picture on a metal plate — called a Daguerreotype — was unveiled that day. It was the first commercial “photograph.”

The museum traces the story from then, through glass plates, then celluloid film, then memory cards. But for most of the 19th century photography was for professionals with heavy cameras and tripods, until, in 1900, George Eastman brought it to the masses.

“That’s when he brought out the Box Brownie camera,” Todd Gustavson, curator of the museum’s technology collection says “It cost a dollar, a roll of film cost 15 cents. Everyone was a photographer.”

Brownies, of course, are here by the dozen, among the 8,500 cameras from 1,000 manufacturers. Many are a part of history, such as one belonging to Matthew Brady, the man whose images brought the U.S. Civil War to the populace.

And there’s the iconic Speed Graphic, the workhorse press camera from the 1920s through the 1960s. One Graphic here is said to be the one cameraman Joe Rosenthal used to take the Pulitzer Prize-winning shot of U.S. Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima in 1945 (though Gustavson says some doubt has recently been cast on this. The camera, however, was certainly Rosenthal’s). There’s a Speed Graphic used in the D-Day landings in 1945. And one from Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Pressmen (and many amateurs) followed the Graphics with Rollieflexes and then 35 millimetre became the norm, until all were replaced by digital cameras with memory cards.

Today Kodak film is manufactured mainly for the motion picture industry, but even there, says Gustavson, digital is taking over.

Brownies and cassettes of Kodachrome — which gave us “transparencies” or “slides” — are among the smallest exhibits. The largest is the monster camera that greets visitors: Its print measures 30 inches across — about three times the width of this newspaper page.

Another huge camera is a part of space history: It photographed the surface of the moon from a satellite in 1966 and ’67, in preparation for the U.S. moon landing in 1969.

SNAPSHOT OF HISTORY

— Digitalization sparked the decline of Kodak. It’s ironic, then, that the digital camera was invented in the Kodak workshops — back in 1975. But the company didn’t follow up; the marketing men felt it would cut into the sale of film.

— That first camera — now in the Smithsonian Institution — captured an image 100 pixels by 100, in black and white. An average point-and-shoot camera today takes around 1,800 by 2,400 pixels.

— The early Daguerreotypes needed a 15-minute exposure, so landscapes were the main subjects as they didn’t move and wouldn’t blur. Later cameras needed a full one minute, which is why Victorian men and women look so stern; it was hard to hold a smile that long.

— The first digital camera for the public came on the market in 1997. Memory: ONE megapixel.

— George Eastman left school at 16 and worked as a photographer, tinkering with film at night. He did not invent roll film but he patented the first practical roll for the masses and his career took off. He was 30 years old.

— For most of the 20th century Kodak was king of the image industry. It made the cameras, it made the film, and the pictures were processed with Kodak chemicals, on Kodak paper.

— There’s an oft-repeated story that photographer Linda Eastman — first wife of Beatle Paul McCartney — was related to the George Eastman family. Not true. (George was of Welsh extraction; Linda’s ancestors were Russian Jews; her father changed his name from Epstein to Eastman).

NEED TO KNOW

For more on the George Eastman Museum, see eastman.org.

For travel information on Rochester, see visitrochester.com.