99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-65- Razzle Dazzle

Episode Date: November 6, 2012

When most people think of camouflage they think of blending in with the environment, but camouflage can also take the opposite approach. It has long been hypothesized that stripes on zebras make it difficult for a predator to distinguish one … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I think if you ask somebody on the street, what is camouflage? I believe the most common answer would be to say, well, it's a figure and it's being hidden by being blended with its background. Scientists today call that background matching. I call that high similarity camouflage. That's Roy Barons. I'm Roy Barons, and I teach in the Department of Art at the University of Northern Iowa.

I teach graphic design and the history of design. Barons is also one of the foremost camouflage experts. Well, I wouldn't go that far. I would. I do. High similarity or blending is just one type of camouflage. It's kind of the boring one. But another type of camouflage that you can find both in nature and in military use is

disruptive camouflage. I call it figure disruption. Figure disruption. Think because it breaks up the figure, it's the opposite of high similarity camouflage. It's high difference. So you're making it very difficult for us to look at the figure and to see it as only a single continuous thing. Rubption? Thru-figure-thruption? Dis- Dis- Zebra stripes have long been thought to be a form of disruptive camouflage.

The stripes make it hard for a predator to distinguish one zebra from another when the zebras are in a large herd. The stripes might also make zebra's less attractive to blood-sucking horseflies. But when it comes to humans, the greatest, most jaw-droppingly spectacular application of disruptive camouflage by the military is Razzle Dazzle. Dazzle camouflage strictly applies to ship camouflage, and even more strictly, it applies to World War I ship camouflage. And it came about because it was discovered that it's almost impossible to make a ship invisible on the ocean. The horizon is changing in color, it's changing in amount of light, so there are all kinds of

conditions that make it so a constantly moving ship can't blend into the background of the sea. And even if you could make a ship invisible, you still have smoke coming out of the sea. And even if you could make a ship invisible, you still have smoke coming out of the smoke stack, so it's not as if you're hiding the ship at all. So the less heavily armor ships were sitting ducks. The crisis came about at the time that the US had not yet entered the war. Remember, this is World War I. It was the British ships that were being sunk, and the German submarines were sinking as many as 50 ships a week. Many of those ships were merchant ships and they were bringing supplies to England,

which is an island, of course, and it really depended on those. And then also there was armaments and other things that were being secretly taken there too. So the design solution was not about invisibility. It was about disruption. A number of artists decided that the best way to avoid getting torpedoed was not to make the ship invisible, but to make it hard to hit.

That's why these kind of erratic, crazy quilt patterns came about, and that's why they were used in that war. It's going to be hard to picture this, but I wanted to try. That once was a time when military ships, even US ships by this point were painted with, and I quote, This is from an anonymous article in New York Times from 1918. Any New Yorker will see at anchor or coming in or going out numerous ships whose painted signs reveal such wild extravagances of form and color as make the landsmen open his eyes with amazement and mystification.

Black and white was very common. They consist of stripes and swirls and kind of arabesque, almost art nouveau shapes. Blue was very common. They consist of stripes and swirls and kind of arabesque, almost art nouveau shapes. Blue was used predominantly, especially in the British versions. But I think you'd be surprised at the range of colors. There were reds that were sometimes used in greens and really quite intense oranges.

Another unidentified US journalist wrote, you should see our fleet. It's camouflage, so it looks like a flock of seagulling Easter eggs. During World War I, dazzle ship camouflage was absolutely fascinating to the public. You have to remember that this is happening just a few years after the, what's called the Armory Show in New York.

It's the first international show of modern art in this country, and it was the introductory show of cubism, futurism, all of those things that people made fun of, and they thought that these are really crazy directions for artists to be going in, so that when this happened, people looked at those gypsum, they said, oh, it's a cubist nightmare, it's futurist, they've taken over the world. As you can probably guess, there were plenty of people who hated dazzle camouflage, traditional Navy men mostly.

They compared it to the clothing at a prostitute would wear, and they made fun of it. Here's how it worked. I can lead you through the steps. At the time, torpedoes fired from U-boats were quite slow, maybe taking a couple minutes to reach their target. So the person firing the torpedo had to lead the target. He had to anticipate where the target ship was going to be when the torpedo arrived. So he had to calculate how to do that,

and that very much depended on knowing the exact angle it's headed toward. That's terribly terribly important. And the other thing is that you have to figure out the speed of the ship. Because then you'll know how far it can go by the time the torpedo gets there. The dazzle camouflage certainly made the ship stand out, but the bulging shapes and vivid hues also made it difficult to determine the speed and direction of the moving ship. It's praying on our assumptions about things

looking smaller as they are more distant. So you could paint a perspective patterns on a ship that would make it look like it was turning in a different direction when in fact you're actually seeing them frontly and they're absolutely flat. The dazzle patterns broke up the figure so that it could look shorter than it really was or it could make it hard to tell if there was one ship or multiple ships. They even painted fake bow waves on them and they would paint the fake bow wave either on the front to make it look like the ship was going faster than it was actually going.

Because that was one way of calculating that. Or they would paint the bow wave on the back. And so you would glance at it while you're looking through this periscope. You might conclude that, oh, it's going in that direction, not in the other direction. So then you surface again to calculate where you're going to shoot, and the thing is gone. It's an entirely different direction and location than you imagined. These patterns weren't just slapped on the side of giant ships

hoping that they'd be confusing enough to be effective. Camouflures, and that's what they were called, the Camouflures, and that's what they were called, the Camouflors tested toy models by inviting an experienced submarine captains to peer through periscopes and report what angle they thought the models were appointed. They determined that sometimes on really effectively camouflage ships, the calculation of the ship captains could be off as much as 55 degrees.

Dazzle only had to screw up the torpedo gunners estimate by 8 degrees for the target ship to effectively avoid a torpedo. The theater of war has changed, so camouflage has changed with it, but there is still dazzle to be found. Actually, if you look at military craft today, there is still dazzle being practiced. But of course, the conditions have changed. Just as in World War I, this came out of those particular set of conditions.

We have to say, well, those are the conditions that we have now, so what would be most effective today? If you look at aircraft, it's broken up very often. If you look at ships, some of them are broken up through these geometric patterns. If you look at some camouflage uniforms, infantry uniforms around the world, you'll find all kinds of break up with dazzle and so forth, are tanks or trucks or so forth. But I'm sad to report that there are no longer flocks of sea-going Easter eggs. 99% Invisible is produced by me Roman Mars and Sam Greenspan. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco. In the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco.

You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, I tweet at Roman Mars, but this week you absolutely must go to 99%imvisible.org and look at pictures of dazzle ships. They are just that amazing. You will not believe it. All you will do this week is talk about dazzle ships, I almost guarantee it. 99%imvisible.org. Radio tapio. From PRX.