Life
The Lawrences are descended from John Philip Lorenz, who had emigrated from Germany in 1748. George was born in Ottawa, Illinois, on February 24, 1868. He was the eldest of six children of Margaret Othelia Tritley and Michael B. Lawrence. Michael was a LaSalle County farmer and a carpenter. Within a few years, the family moved sixty miles east to a Kankakee County farm. George went to school through the eighth-grade in the nearby town of Manteno, Illinois. He also attended St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in Manteno.
Around 1890, he moved to Chicago and began working at the Abbott Buggy Co. factory in Auburn, Illinois. There, he invented a method of attaching iron rims on wooden wheels. In 1890, Lawrence married Alice Herenden and they had two children: Raymond W. Lawrence and George Lee Lawrence. In 1891, he opened The Lawrence Portrait Studio at the corner of Yale Avenue and 63rd Street, sharing the space and expenses with fellow photographer Irwin W. Powell.
In the mid–1890s, Lawrence perfected the use of "flashlight photography", which was the norm until flashbulbs were invented years later. In 1900, he built the world's largest camera to take a photograph of the Alton Limited locomotive, owned by the Chicago & Alton Railway. The camera weighed 1400 pounds (640 kg) and used a 4.5′ × 8′ glass-plate negative. The photograph was taken for the 1900 Exposition Universelle (Paris Exposition of 1900) in Paris, France and won "The Grand Prize of the World." He also made innovations in areas of aerial photography such as ballooning and camera–carrying kites.
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