This was in 1857, and four years later, when the American Republic became rent by a conflict of brother against brother, Mathew B. Brady of Washington and New York, asked the permission of the Government and the protection of the Secret Service to demonstrate the practicability of Scott-Archer's discovery in the severest test that the invention had ever been given. Brady was an artist by temperament and gained his technical knowledge of portraiture in the rendezvous of Paris. He had been interested in the discoveries of Niepce and Daguerre and Fox-Talbot along the crude lines of photography but with the introduction of the collodion process of Scott-Archer he accepted the science as a profession and, during twenty-five years of labor as a pioneer photographer, took the likenesses of the political celebrities of the epoch and of eminent men and women throughout the country.
Brady's request was granted and he invested heavily in cameras which were made specially for the hard usage of warfare. These cameras were cumbersome and were operated by what is known as the old wet-plate process, requiring a dark room which was carried with them onto the battle-fields. The experimental operations under Brady proved so successful that they attracted the immediate attention of President Lincoln, General Grant and Allan Pinkerton, known as Major Allen and chief of the Secret Service. Equipments were hurried to all divisions of the great army and some of them found their way into the Confederate ranks.
"THE black art," by which Brady secured these photographs, was as mystifying as the work of a magician. It required a knowledge of chemistry and, considering the difficulties, one wonders how Brady had courage to undertake it on the battle-field. He first immersed eighty grains of cotton-wool in a mixture of one ounce each of nitric and sulphuric acids for fifteen seconds, washing them in running water. The pyroxylin was dissolved in a mixture of equal parts of sulphuric ether and absolute alcohol. This solution gave him the ordinary collodion to which he added iodide of potassium and a little potassium bromide. He then poured the iodized collodion on a clean piece of sheet glass and allowed two or three minutes for the film to set. The coated plate was taken into a "dark room," which Brady carried with him, and immersed for about a minute in a bath of thirty grains of silver nitrate to every ounce of water. The plate was now sensitive to white light and must be placed immediately in the camera and exposed and developed within five minutes to get good results, especially in the South during the summer months. It was returned to the dark room at once and developed by pouring over it a mixture of water, one ounce; acetic acid, one dram; pyrogallic acid, three grains, and "fixed" by soaking in a strong solution of hyposulphite of soda or cyanide of potassium. This photograph shows Brady's "dark room" in the Confederate lines southeast of Atlanta, Georgia, shortly before the battle of July 22, 1864. It is a fine example of wet-plate photography.
THE secret never has been divulged. How Mr. Brady gained the confidence of such men as Jefferson Davis and General Robert E. Lee, and was passed through the Confederate lines, may never be known. It is certain that he never betrayed the confidence reposed in him and that the negatives were not used for secret service information, and this despite the fact, that Allan Pinkerton and the Artist Brady were intimate. Neither of these men had any idea of the years which the conflict was to rage and Mr. Brady expended all his available funds upon paraphernalia. The government was strained to its utmost resources in keeping its defenders in food and ammunition. It was not concerned in the development of a new science nor the preservation of historical record. It faced a mighty foe of its own blood. It must either fall or rise in a decisive blow.
It was indeed a sorry time for an aesthete. Mr. Brady was unable to secure money. His only recourse was credit. This he secured from Anthony, who was importing photographic materials into America and was a founder of the trade on this continent. The next obstacle was the securing of men competent to operate a camera. Nearly every able-bodied man was engaged in warfare. The science was new and required a knowledge of chemistry. Brady was a man of speculative disposition and plunged into the apparently impossible undertaking of preserving on glass the scenes of action during one of the most tremendous conflicts that the world has known. Pressing toward the firing-line, planting his camera on the field almost before the smoke of artillery and musket had cleared, he came out of the War with his thousands of negatives, perpetuating scenes that human eyes never expected to look upon again. There can be but very few important movements that failed to become imprinted on these glass records.