The American camouflage is based on scientific principles which embody
so much in the way of chromatic paradox as to warrant setting forth
rather fully, even though at the present time, for good and sufficient
reasons relating to German methods of locating vessels, the Americans
have more or less abandoned their ideas of low visibility and taken up
with the dazzle idea.
A mural painter of New York, William Andrew Mackay, who had long
experimented in the chemistry of color (he is now a member of the staff
of navy camoufleurs), had applied a process of low visibility to naval
vessels long before war broke out in Europe. The basis of his theory of
camouflage was that red, green, and violet, in terms of light, make
gray; they don't in pigment.
The Mackay scheme of invisibility will be easily grasped by the reader
if we take the example of the rainbow. The phenomenon of the rainbow,
then, teaches us that what we know to be white light, or daylight, is
composed of rays of various colors. If an object, say the hull of a
vessel at sea, prevents these rays from coming to the eye, that hull, or
other object, is of course clearly defined, the reason being that the
iron mass shuts out the light-rays behind it. Mr. Mackay discovered that
by applying to the sides of a ship paint representing the three
light-rays shut out by the vessel's hull--red, green, and violet--the
hull is less visible than a similar body painted In solid color.
In a series of experiments made under the supervision of the Navy
Department after we entered the war an oil-tanker ship was so
successfully painted in imitation of the color-rays of light that, at
three miles, the tanker seemed to melt into the horizon.
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