Lawrence's Kite Photo of Post-Earthquake San Francisco in 1906 |
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| Date: | 1906 |
| Author: | George R Lawrence |
| Dwnld: | Full Size (11.41mb) |
| Source: | Library of Congress |
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| See our Prints Page for more details | |
To commemorate the 106th anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, here's a famous aerial photograph of the destruction it visited on the city.
This isn't a map, of course, but it shares its perspective with many of the birdseye maps on this site, and it illustrates an important jump in available technology that answers a common question that readers ask about them.
One reason that this photograph by George Lawrence has been remembered for so long, is because it was demoing a pretty cutting-edge photographic technique.
The image was taken from a kite flying 2000 feet (600 m) over the San Francisco Bay. If you're not impressed by that, I encourage you to try to fly a 49 lb (22 kg) early-20th Century camera 2000 feet and then keep it steady enough to take a picture.
So... by way of answering the questions about wether or not the earlier Victorian-era birdseye artists worked from photographs; I'm going to say "no". There are a few instances in the Mountain West where I'm quite sure they did part of their work from the side of a nearby mountain (in some cases, you can even deduce the specific mountain), but for the most part these guys were applying street-level physical and photographic survey to a projected and skewed town plan. I'm almost sure of it.
For more map resources and imagery from this period in San Francisco's history, check out the California Historical Society's website.
Pretty impressive technology for the time. Wonder how they triggered the camera, or set the timer. Thank you very much for posting this.
Took a steel cable to support the 48 lb custom panoramic camera from a string of cargo kites flying above. So Lawrence triggered the shutter with an electric current up the cable. From experience he knew he needed positive confirmation the shutter did trip, so the shutter dropped a flag.
Usually he took his panoramas at mid-day, even illumination everywhere, and not into the setting sun. But that day was foggy, and the electric shutter shorted out, and it was only when the sun came out later in the day that the shutter circuit dried out and he could take the picture. Setting sun a complete accident, but certainly part of the value of the picture.
Lawrence did take the biggest negative ever used in aerial photography, to this day, four feet wide. Took a lot of patience over years to perfect his system, for example, he had to use a tapered slit in front of the lens to allow more light from the horizon and less light from the scene in front, to get an overall more balanced exposure.
The official international aircraft height record in 1906 was ….. 13 feet (by Santos Dumont). Lawrence fell from a balloon over 200 ft. into the Chicago stockyards, only surviving because he bounced off phone and telegraph wires on the way down, which helped put him off balloons. So kites were the only practical alternative for aerial photography.
He’s a challenge to our technology today. Difficult to understand his achievement unless you have a paper print at least 4 feet wide. Someday we’ll have high resolution monitors at least 4 feet wide to show his panoramas at that size, but not yet.
Very cool, Peter. Thanks for sharing that; a very insightful read.
How’d you come to know so much about the man and his methods? You a photography buff? History buff? Both?
Either way; many thanks and much appreciated.
Guy who did the most to find out info about George Lawrence and his aerial panoramas was Dr. Simon Baker from North Carolina. There’s a collection of his articles on Lawrence here:
http://robroy.dyndns.info/lawrence/
I’ve enjoyed trying to promote Lawrence a bit myself, a businessman and inventor and artist all at the same time. And his aerial panoramas have to be seen to be believed, a computer screen isn’t enough. So Lawrence was even more than a century ahead of his time.
Peter