SENSITIVE PAPER | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 13, 1896

SENSITIVE PAPER.

The Boston Advertiser learns that a French photographer lately invented a process by which a bit of ordinary paper—the leaf of a book, for example—can be made sensitive to the light without affecting the rest of the page. Acting on this hint, the French war minister has begun to take portraits of conscript and recruits on the paper, which gives their height, complexion, age, etc.; and the cheapness and swiftness of the operation, which is already in use in the French army, is something remarkable.

It costs only one cent to get two copies of a portrait of Jacques Bonhomme—one for his individual register and the other for his muster roll—and so rapid is the process that in a few hours a whole regiment can be so photographed. The soldiers file along one by one, and each sits for three seconds in the photographic chair, and the thing is done.

They even mark the man's regimental number on his breast with chalk, and thus get a complete identification of him in case of desertion or death, or when a discharged soldier presents his claim for pay or a pension. If such a system had been in use during our civil war, the Pension Bureau would not now be paying out so many thousand dollars a quarter to deserters, bounty jumpers, and other sham heroes of the Union army.—Selected.