Hero #1

I’ve been thinking about writing a series of entries introducing you to a group of people I consider to be pretty damn fabulous. I’m not sure how long it will be before I get bored, maybe after the first one, maybe after a hundred, but let’s give it a go shall we.

I bet you’re all thinking I’m going to start with my snuggle bunny, Mr Ignaz Semmelweis? Well, you’re wrong. I’ll get to him, eventually, but it’s only right someone else gets the privilege. Ignaz gets far too much attention from me. No, first up is a fella rarely mentioned these days, but a hundred years ago George “Flashlight” Lawrence was the hippest guy in town due to his pioneering work in the world of flashlight, aerial, and panoramic photography. He’s probably best known for his rather spectacular 160-degree panorama shot of San Francisco taken after the 1906 earthquake, entitled San Francisco in Ruins:

thumbnail image (click to see the 7000 x 2748 monster)

My super ultra wide angled lens wept when it saw that one. But his placement in my list of The Fabulous Ones is almost entirely down to his development, in 1900, of this beast:

At the time it was the world’s largest camera, and cost the price of a house to build.

But how did it come about? His success in panoramic photography led officials at the Chicago and Alton railroad to request his services in producing a single-plate image of their new passenger train, ‘Alton Limited.’ They’d got it all figured out in their heads, Lawrence would provide “the largest photograph in the world of the handsomest train in the world.” Lovely!

The photographer suggested he could, with his existing cameras, make a series of sectional views and piece them all together, but the rather enthusiastic officials made it quite clear they were having none of that. They had a faultless train, and with it they demanded a faultless photograph, insisting that “in length, the picture must not measure less than eight feet.” This was, after all, the beginning of the 20th century. Why not demand a single-plate photograph no smaller than eight feet in length?

Not one to be defeated by the rather insignificant point that the equipment capable of producing such a thing didn’t exist, Lawrence spent the next eight months designing and building the Überkamera with local inventor J. A. Anderson. What they built was a 640kg chunk of technology way ahead of it’s time, requiring 15 men to operate the thing, with a 10′x6′ plate holder which would shoot an 8′x4 1/2′ photograph – three times larger than the average print size of existing panoramic cameras. When the morning of the shoot finally arrived, they hauled the equipment in to a horse-drawn van and transported it over 6 miles to a suitable location in the middle of a field.

Say cheese.

thumbnail image (click to see this wide angled beauty)

Three prints of this handsome train were submitted to the Paris Exposition of 1900, one in the railway category, another in photography, and the third submitted in to the United States Government Building. So flabbergasted by this piece of photographic genius, the image was immediately branded a “fake” and the French Consul General of New York was sent along to Chicago to have a good look at the Überkamera to make sure Flashlight Lawrence wasn’t cheating. When they were all convinced of its authenticity, they gladly awarded the photographer their ‘Grand Prize of the World for Photographic Excellence.’

That, my lovelies, is why George Raymond Lawrence is number one in my list of most fabulous people ever to have issued forth in to the world. I hope you agree.