Free Republic

Eastman Kodak issued a concerning message to investors Monday, indicating that the 133-year-old camera company's future may be in trouble. In its second quarter earnings report, released Monday, Kodak indicated it is losing profits, adding that it doesn't have the “committed financing or available liquidity” to pay its $500 million debt obligations. Kodak added that right now, the plan to fund its debt consists of using excess funds from the termination of a retirement pension plan to "reduce the amount of term debt and to amend, extend or refinance its remaining debt and preferred stock obligations."

Mr. Starkweather was working as a junior engineer in the offices of the Xerox Corporation in Rochester, N.Y., in 1964 — several years after the company had introduced the photocopier to American office buildings — when he began working on a version that could transmit information between two distant copiers, so that a person could scan a document in one place and send a copy to someone else in another. He decided that this could best be done with the precision of a laser, another recent invention, which can use amplified light to transfer images onto paper. But then he...