The Weirdly Specific Science Behind Ship Camouflage

0:00 Can you spot the ship in this image?

0:02 It might be tricky because it's been

0:04 camouflaged, but if you look really

0:06 closely, you can see the ship right

0:08 here.

0:09 This is dazzle camouflage, and

0:11 it's probably the most popular and

0:13 widely used method for camouflaging a

0:15 ship.

0:16 It's been used since World War I,

0:17 and can still be seen on warships today.

0:20 But you, the brilliant and discerning

0:23 viewer, may have noticed that it doesn't

0:25 really make the ship any harder to see.

0:27 And that's part of the point.

0:28 To explain how this camouflage works, we need to go

0:31 back to the thing that brought it into

0:32 existence in the first place, the

0:34 killing of Archduke Ferdinand of

0:36 Austria.

0:37 In 1914, this guy was

0:38 assassinated and everyone was pissed

0:40 off.

0:40 To blow off some steam, we had to

0:42 invent a whole bunch of new ways to kill

0:43 each other about it, such as

0:50 But I want to talk about this one, the

0:52 torpedo.

0:53 This turned naval warfare on

0:55 its head.

0:56 Going into World War I, the

0:57 British Royal Navy was unparalleled.

1:00 The largest and most powerful navy in the

1:02 world.

1:03 The Germans knew they couldn't

1:04 just take control of the world shipping

1:05 lines by using conventional warships.

1:07 And no one had invented manipulating a

1:09 foreign population into voting against

1:11 their own interest by posting things

1:12 that old people find scary on Facebook

1:13 yet.

1:14 So, they had to take the low road.

1:16 And the low road was underwater.

1:18 In 1914, the British HMS Pathfinder would

1:21 earn the honorable distinction of being

1:23 the first ever ship to be sunk by a

1:25 submarine.

1:26 Over the next few months,

1:27 British ships in the North Sea started

1:28 dropping like flies.

1:30 Despite the size of

1:31 their fleet, the Royal Navy had no way

1:33 to deal with these stealthy new German

1:35 Ubot.

1:36 Their solution, which they

1:37 implemented years later, would not come

1:39 from a lab or a weapons manufacturer,

1:42 but by an old British painter named

1:44 Norman Wilkinson.

1:45 Now, I don't have a

1:46 picture of this guy that I could

1:47 license, but imagine an old British man.

1:49 That's [music] exactly what Norman

1:51 looked like.

1:52 He had spent years painting

1:53 pictures of British ships for war

1:55 propaganda posters.

1:56 And after shading the curves and contours of hundreds of

1:59 ships, he realized that he had a way to

2:01 hide them.

2:01 A technique that would later

2:03 be dubbed dazzle camouflage.

2:05 To explain how this works, though, we need to talk

2:07 about how these ships were getting sunk

2:08 in the first place.

2:09 Sinking a ship with

2:10 a torpedo, at least at the time, was

2:12 really complicated.

2:14 These torpedoes were fairly slow, maybe 40 mph, and could

2:17 only travel in a straight line.

2:19 That means that in order to actually hit a

2:21 ship with one of these, you couldn't

2:22 shoot directly at it.

2:24 It would be long

2:25 gone by the time the torpedo got there.

2:26 Instead, you had to fire at where the

2:28 ship was going to be several minutes

2:30 from now.

2:31 And that is tricky.

2:33 It requires knowing a lot more than just

2:36 where the ship is.

2:37 You also had to know

2:38 how quickly it was moving and exactly

2:40 what direction it was moving in.

2:41 These sorts of calculations had to be done in

2:43 real time using one of these and one of

2:46 these.

2:47 Speed was generally measured with

2:48 a pocket watch following the mass of the

2:50 ship as it traveled from one side of the

2:52 scope to the other.

2:53 Distance could be calculated with two lenses and a little

2:55 bit of trigonometry.

2:56 [music] And direction used a cuttingedge German

2:58 technique called looking at it and

3:00 making a really good guess.

3:02 All of these techniques were visual and all of them

3:04 relied on being able to tell which part

3:05 of the ship was which.

3:06 Where the mast was, where the front of the ship was

3:08 pointing.

3:09 All pretty easy to do from a

3:10 distance, unless the ship looked like

3:12 this.

3:14 Dazzle camo, of course, did not

3:16 make the ship harder to see, but it did

3:18 make it a lot harder to understand what

3:20 you were seeing.

3:21 From a distance, these

3:22 black lines can create shadows where

3:24 there are none, and these white lines

3:25 can erase the shadows that were already

3:27 there.

3:28 This triangle in the middle might

3:29 look like it's pointed at the camera,

3:30 for example, when it's actually a flat

3:32 surface on the side of the ship.

3:34 It can also be tricky to tell where the sky

3:36 starts and the ship ends.

3:37 Is the deck of

3:38 the ship here or here?

3:40 If you get that

3:41 question wrong, you'll also be wrong

3:42 about the angle that the ship is

3:44 pointing.

3:44 The hope here was that at

3:46 least one of these mistakes would be

3:47 enough to get the submarines to either

3:49 fire their torpedoes in the wrong

3:50 direction or reposition themselves to

3:52 fire from too far away.

3:54 Did it work?

3:55 The answer is a resounding kind of.

3:58 There wasn't a ton of data to back any of this

4:00 up, but a lot of ships ended up using

4:02 the camo [music] anyway.

4:03 About 4,000 merchant ships and 400 Navy ships were

4:06 dazzled [music] by the end of the war.

4:08 The Navy found that the dazzled ships

4:10 were 26% less [music] likely to get

4:12 struck in the center of their hall,

4:14 suggesting that they were probably

4:15 harder to get an accurate lock on, but

4:17 they were also 31% more likely to be

4:19 attacked in the first place because,

4:21 well, they look like this.

4:22 Frankly, it's hard to say whether this stuff is a good

4:24 idea, but it never went away.

4:26 It carried on through World War II and still lives

4:29 on to this day.

4:30 Admittedly, it's not going to do much against a modern homing

4:32 torpedo.

4:33 Nor is it going to hide your

4:34 ship from radars or sonars or

4:36 satellites, but even in the year of our

4:37 lord 2026, we still sometimes have to

4:40 use our eyeballs to find and kill each

4:42 other.

4:42 And I think that's beautiful.

4:43 Piloted drones, for example, still rely

4:46 on these same sorts of visual cues that

4:48 World War I era torpedoes relied on, and

4:50 they can be tricked just the same.

4:52 Off the battlefield, dazzle camo has even

4:54 more applications.

4:55 If a car company

4:56 wants to test a prototype on a public

4:58 road, it'll often look like this or

5:00 this.

5:00 If a competitor manages to get

5:02 their hands on a picture, it'll be hard

5:03 to discern exactly what the shape of the

5:05 car is, and lots of little details will

5:07 get lost in the shuffle.

5:08 Plus, if someone fires a torpedo at their

5:10 valuable prototype, it'll be much more

5:12 likely to miss and kill a bystander

5:14 instead.

5:15 [music] That's just good

5:15 business sense.

5:18 But more than in war or capitalism,

5:20 dazzle camouflage finds use every day in

5:22 nature.

5:23 The same principles that

5:24 protected ships in World War I protect

5:26 animals like damsel fish and zebras from

5:28 predators.

5:29 Unfortunately, stripes aren't always enough to protect these animals

5:31 from us because humans have become the

5:34 one predator nature never prepared them

5:36 for.

5:36 So, protecting them now takes more

5:38 than evolution.

5:39 It takes people stepping

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