In one scenario an appropriately camouflaged oil tanker, when seen from three miles away, was said to have “seemed to melt into the horizon.”
Dazzle camo series#
The three-dimensional effect completely fools the eye of an observer, making the ship hard to identify.Ī series of ship camouflage experiments based on Mackay’s research were conducted by the Navy. Painted in dazzle camouflage, the USS West Mahomet illustrates how the paint scheme distorts the apparent aspect of the bow. When applied to the sides of a ship, these colors make the hull less visible than a similar one painted in a solid color. Mackay discovered that red, green, and violet light rays are absorbed by a vessel’s hull. If the hull of a vessel at sea absorbs some portions of the color spectrum and therefore prevents them from reaching the eye of an observer, that hull or other object will not be sharply defined to the observer. Of course, in nature the same phenomenon is seen when suspended water particles in the atmosphere create a rainbow. School children in science class often experiment with clear prisms which, when held at the proper angle to a light source, expose the light’s many colored elements. Mackay’s approach to camouflage was derived from the fact that what we see as white light is actually composed of many colors. It was his responsibility to supervise the artists who applied camouflage patterns to merchant ships in that district’s harbors. ship camouflage during World War I was William Andrew Mackay, head of the New York District of the Emergency Fleet Corporation’s camouflage section. A group of their followers recruited hundreds of artists to join the American Camouflage Corps, which had been formed in 1917.Īnother major developer of U.S. Navy to adopt their countershading methods to camouflage ships was approved for use on American vessels. Thayer and Brush continued their camouflage experiments as a team and individually as World War I unfolded. They found that a vessel could be painted in green wavy lines from the water line and running upward for about 20 feet above that a combination of red, green, and violet covering upper portions of the hull-as well as the lifeboats, masts, and funnels-seemed to make the ship “disappear.” (One hundred feet is the range at which the human eye loses its ability to separate the three color cues.)Įxploring this principle, Thayer and Brush proposed using countershading to paint ships with patterns derived from this methodology. For example, a bird that with blue and yellow coloring-or even a parrot with red, green, and violet coloring-appears as dull gray at a distance of 100 feet. Mother Nature also uses various colors and patterns to make certain birds and animals appear differently and fool the predators that feed upon them. These color drawings show how the three-dimensional effect of the dazzle pattern completely fools the eye of an observer, making it difficult to comprehend the shape and direction of the ship. Separately, in the United States, two artists, Abbott Thayer and George de Forest Brush, conducted groundbreaking research into camouflage in the late 1800s, focusing on certain aspects of the protective coloration of plants and animals.
Another artist, John Graham Kerr, also vied for the honor of being the father of the concept, but a court declared Wilkinson the true inventor. This technique was not the brainchild of some naval strategist or a grizzled veteran of the seas but that of British artist Norman Wilkinson, who is credited with inventing dazzle camouflage in time for the Great War. So is clothing a soldier in a color-splotched uniform or affixing leaves to his body and helmet to help him blend in with his surroundings.īut painting a ship in contrasting colors, irregular geometric shapes, zigzag lines, and bold black and white stripes seems to go against common sense. Draping a white bedsheet over a tank or artillery piece in a snowy landscape is an obvious example of camouflage. The word camouflage is derived from the French word camoufler, which means to disguise. In the military’s case, it was to disguise ships and aircraft with what is known as disruptive or “dazzle” camouflage. They were all users of rather distinctive-some would say garish-painting styles. Navy, the British Royal Navy, and the U.S.
0 kommentar(er)
