(3 of 3)
Photographers who admire the work of Dr. Erich ("Candid Camera") Salomon (TIME, Nov. 9), realize with what enormous handicaps silky-whiskered Mathew Brady had to contend. In his jolting little wagon, with his enormous chicken coop of a camera, he had to coat his plates with collodion, expose and develop them before they had time to dry. Minie balls crashed through his little developing wagon, his horses were killed, hundreds of plates were smashed, yet he took troops in action, dead soldiers sprawled in the breastworks. He took Lincoln, Grant, most of the Federal generals of the war, and made a collection of more than 7,000 pictures, 2,000 of which the Government was glad to buy for $25,000. Today they are one of the chief treasures of the War College.
—To make a daguerreotype, a silver-plated copper plate, scrupulously clean, was subjected to the vapor from iodine until it turned a golden orange color. With the subject's neck held rigidly in an iron clamp the plate was exposed in a camera for from three to 30 minutes, developed by holding it over a cup of hot mercury, fixed by dipping in a mixture of hyposulphite of soda and gold chloride. Finger marks and heat ruin the image of a daguerreotype.