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| Chicago Board of Trade -- April 4, 1903 Photograph by George H. Lawrence (Library of Congress Photo) |
Anyone who does
even the most basic research about the history of Chicago’s Board of Trade will
come across the above photograph. It was
taken on this date, April 4, in 1903 at the height of the day’s trading
session. I always thought it was a
really cool piece of work, capturing the hustle and bustle of the floor and the
magnificence of the pits in which the traders were at work.
The photograph
was the result of a really impressive piece of engineering on the part of the
photographer, George Raymond Lawrence.
As The Tribune described the
effort on the following day, “The largest amount of flashlight powder that has
ever been used in taking one picture was used by George R. Lawrence yesterday
when he took a photograph of all the traderings clamoring in the pits.”
Mr. Lawrence used
twelve pounds of flash powder, distributed to 350 lights that were draped from
the balconies of the trading room. The
lights were all discharged “simultaneously by electricity.”
George Lawrence
came to Chicago at the age of 20, having attained an eighth grade education in
the farm country around Manteno. At an
early age he showed a genius for tinkering and at his first job in Chicago – at
the Abbott wagon factory in Auburn Park, he invented a system of attaching iron
rims to wooden wheels that allowed the company to employ one employee to do a
job that previously required eight men to complete.
Following his
marriage to Alice Herenden in 1890, Lawrence opened the Lawrence Portrait
Studio at Yale Avenue and Sixty-Third Street.
By 1896 he had a shop on the corner of Van Buren and Wabash, advertising
the business in this way, “The hitherto impossible in photography is our
specialty.” [Petterchak, Alice. “Photography
Genius: George R. Lawrence & ‘The
Hitherto Impossible’”]
Always the
tinkerer, he began to experiment with the flash powder that would make the
Board of Trade photograph a reality. He
endured “numerous explosions which burned off his hair, his eyebrows and
mustache, and burst his eardrums.”
[Petterchak] In one unfortunate
experiment he blew up a building on the South side.
Eventually,
though, he found a magnesium formula that worked. But he went much farther, developing a
panoramic camera weighing 1,400 pounds with a bellows that extended 20 feet, a
monster that required 20 assistants to operate.
The photographic plate on which the image was captured measured five
feet by 8 feet.
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| San Francisco Panoramic Photo -- George Lawrence, photographer (Library of Congress Photo) |
Later he
developed the ability to take aerial photographs, first by a balloon and then
by a system of kites with special rigging to hold the camera steady. It was this last innovation that allowed
Lawrence to capture the images that come to mind when we think of the great San
Francisco earthquake of 1906. That same
year he assembled 28,000 pounds of photographic equipment and headed for Africa
where it took 400 natives and 64 oxen to get the stuff into the jungle.
That was
enough. He quit photography and took on
a new interest in aviation, which he followed closely until he died on December
15, 1938.
George Lawrence wasn't done when he exploded all that flash powder at the Board of Trade. In the same week he headed for the Union Stockyards in Chicago where he took the following panoramic photo, an amazing shot that captures what an enterprise that must have been.
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| Chicago Union Stockyards -- George Lawrence, photographer (Library of Congress Photo) |
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