EASTMAN Kodak Co., which invented the hand-held camera and helped bring the world the first pictures from the moon, filed for bankruptcy protection Thursday, capping a prolonged plunge for one of America’s best-known companies.

    The more than 130-year-old photographic film pioneer, which had tried to restructure to become a seller of consumer products like cameras, said it had also obtained a US$950 million, 18-month credit facility from Citigroup to keep it going.

    The loan and bankruptcy protection from U.S. trade creditors may give Kodak the time it needs to find buyers for some of its 1,100 digital patents, the key to its remaining value, and to reshape its business while continuing to pay its 17,000 workers.

    “The board of directors and the entire senior management team unanimously believe that this is a necessary step and the right thing to do for the future of Kodak,” Antonio Perez, Kodak chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

    At end September, the group had total assets of US$5.1 billion and liabilities of US$6.75 billion.

    Kodak said it and its U.S. subsidiaries had filed for Chapter 11 business reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Non-U.S. subsidiaries were not covered by the filing and would continue to honor all obligations to their suppliers, it added.

    Kodak once dominated its industry and its film was the subject of a popular Paul Simon song, but it failed to embrace more modern technologies quickly enough, such as the digital camera — ironically, a product it even invented.

    George Eastman, a high school dropout from upstate New York, founded Kodak in 1880, and began to make photographic plates. To get his business going, he splurged on a second-hand engine for US$125.

    Within eight years, the Kodak name had been trademarked and the company had introduced the hand-held camera as well as roll-up film, where it became the dominant producer.

    Nearly a century after Kodak’s founding, the astronaut Neil Armstrong used a Kodak camera the size of a shoebox to take pictures as he became in 1969 the first man to walk on the moon.

    Six years after Armstrong’s walk, and not long after Simon told his mother not to take his Kodachrome away, Kodak invented the digital camera.

    (SD-Agencies)