Thursday, May 17, 2018

Camouflage Remembered


Camouflage Remembered

When I left my job at North American Aviation in Downey, Calif. In August of 1953 I had no inkling that I would eventually become the sole expert in the employ of the Navy for camouflage. I had a lot to learn in a very short time. I had heard a talk at a meeting of the Los Angeles chapter of the Optical Society of America by Seibert Quimby Duntley, Head of the Visibility Laboratory of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. I was intrigued and requested a job. I was hired at a slight reduction in salary. During the two years that I spent at the Visibility Lab I learned a lot about our country’s efforts at camouflage during the war. Duntley, a professor at MIT, had been under contract during that period to form a group to study the problems of visibility and concealment. I clearly recall one of his anecdotes, “If it’s camouflaged bomb it.” One of the East Coast worries in those days was the real possibility of the Germans flying up and down the coast from Greenland to a Caribbean base bombing the major cities. Boston had worries. The Charles River at night was a guide post to all the major targets in the area no matter what means might be taken to hide them. Duntley was my first mentor and I was the recipient of a wealth of information on The United States activity in camouflage during that period. Most of the stories I recall of his I will save for another time.

The Navy decided after the war to relocate its small group at the Bureau of Ships in Washington devoted to visibility and camouflage to the Navy Electronics Lab in San Diego in order to be closer to the SIO Visibility Lab and to take advantage of the perpetual good weather for research purposes. One of that group was Cdr. Dayton R. E. Brown, an artist originally from Coronado and a self-made scientist that had served the Navy during the war as their camouflage and visibility expert. He was slated to be a consultant to the group but they needed a manager, a Head. They asked Duntley, the senior scientist in the field, for a recommendation and he suggested me. I took the position, Head of the Visibility and Concealment Branch of the Navy Electronics laboratory in the summer of 1955. I occupied this position and its successors until my retirement in 1975 as the sole individual involved in camouflage. Brown retired and died during that interim and the rest of the personnel  under my guidance became a much expanded organization called the Electro-optics Division, and were engaged in visibility, fiber optics, lasers and infra-red research and development.

What I really want to pass on are some of the anecdotes about camouflage that may not be on the record at this time. Abbott Handerson Thayer (August 12, 1849 – May 29, 1921), a well-known American artist, is sometimes described as the father of camouflage. Brown often cited his work as basic in the design of modern camouflage. It is true that Thayer, an artist and naturalist, came up with the disruptive design concept, taken from nature, that later went by the name of ‘dazzle.’ Dazzle painting of ships was common in WWI and early WWII. It was later abandoned by the Navy for a variety of reasons. First, it was expensive and time consuming to apply; two, it frequently led to accidents and misidentification by friendly forces; and three, it didn’t actually work very well. By the time I saw service in the Pacific in 1945 there were no dazzle painted ships in service.

Thayer’s major contribution turned out to be ‘counter-shading.’ Dayton Brown’s development of counter-shading for ships, submarines and aircraft became standard by war’s end. Today’s ships all sport ‘haze grey’ and ‘deck grey’ as standard schemes and nobody notices because it seems ‘they’ve always been that way.’ Thayer took his idea straight from nature. Fish and birds tend to have a natural protective coloration, dark on the top and light on the shaded bottom.

There are two anecdotes related by Brown. He tells how he convinced Admiral John Sidney McCain (Senator McCain’s father), commander of Pacific Naval Air at the time, of the value of counter-shading on aircraft at a remote Pacific Atoll. He had heard of a short visit by McCain at the base and wanted to show the admiral how it would look. The admiral had no time so Cdr. Brown offered to paint a plane at the end of the runway with a fire hose while the admiral looked on from his aircraft waiting to take off. This occurred and all Navy planes had that dark top and pale underbelly thereafter.

The second event occurred in a Navy office in Washington. Cdr. Brown was trying to explain counter-shading to a group of high level officers. It was frustrating. Finally he took a cigarette and held it up in front of a window and asked them what color it was. It clearly appeared black in spite of its white paper wrapping against the bright backlight of the window.

Brown told one further story for which I happen to have the aerial photo negatives. He had a project shortly after the war to look at submerged submarines off the coast of Hawaii. Like the story of the Emperor’s clothes, submariners have a tendency to believe they are invisible once they submerge their vessel. Traditionally they have always painted the subs black. Brown’s pictures showed, as he described it, “they looked like big black whales submerged in mint jelly.” Thereafter subs have sported a somewhat lighter shade.

Long after I retired from Navy employment I had an opportunity to lecture the Top Gun School at Miramar Naval Air Station on disruptive painting of jet fighters. What goes around comes around. Decades after that a young naval flyer knocked on my door at home and wanted information on how to camouflage a jet fighter. It’s a little like the story of the ‘Yehudi’ project and General Dynamics – but that too is for another day.

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Slide Rule


Slide rule1 – This piece could be about that indispensable, essential and interesting scientific device that used to hang on the belt of every engineering or science university student in the pre-1960 era. But it’s not. It’s about an encounter with a most interesting man, and it might reveal a tiny sliver of forgotten history. The man is Arthur Frederick Eckel2 (1893 – 1960). Nearly all of us who are now in our nineties remember only his last name in connection with the magnesium marvel, the Pickett and Eckel slide rule.

After the war, marriage, and the university I began my working career in the summer of 1951 at the North American Aviation facility in Downey, California. We were engaged in a very large research and development project aimed at producing a long range intercontinental air-breathing unmanned missile for the cold war. At that time, before satellites, the uncertainty of where Russia was exceeded 10 miles so these missiles were to be armed with very large hydrogen bombs to assure the distant target’s destruction. My work was involved with the star tracking guidance system; optical telescopes, gyros and very high precision mechanical parts.

The dozens of engineers and scientists at Downey were assigned desks in a very large hanger -- no cubicles or walls. I was fortunate to have a desk next to an older gentleman introduced to me as “Dr. Eckel.” Only after having known him for many weeks did I finally learn that he was one of the inventors of the famous Pickett and Eckel slide rule. That, I certainly knew about. I was impressed.

Dr. Eckel had been hired by North American because of his extensive experience in precision machine work, not for his knowledge of slide rules. The top managers were making an oral history of some of his early work through detailed interviews. He was depended on for advice in developing the methods needed for creating the inertial navigation system and the pointing mechanisms for the star tracking telescopes. I was lucky to have actual hands on work on those devices. I was also lucky to be able to have conversations with Dr. Eckel, my desk neighbor, reminiscing about some of his early efforts in the field of astronomy.

At North American his advice was especially needed in making what was called a ‘lead screw.’ This threaded item was only about 6 inches long and about an inch in diameter. It had a very fine thread machined along its length. As it turned in the final star tracking assembly it pointed the small telescope at the selected stars with an accuracy of better than one second of arc. That is hard to do. Some of Eckel’s advice included placing the screw in a vertical position for machining because of the effect of gravity; even with that one inch thick rod an imperceptible sag during the machining would introduce error. And he advised that the final polishing of the threads had to be done with ground chicken bones. Sounds crazy but he was serious.

In casual conversations he told me of his early career. As a young machinist he had been employed in the shop in Pasadena that was constructing the 100 inch Hooker telescope for Mt. Wilson. This was to be the instrument that Hubble used to discover the universe. As some may know the original funding given to George Ellery Hale came from a man named Hooker, hence the name, but later funding to finish the project was given by Andrew Carnegie. The work began in 1912 and was completed in 1917. During this period Eckel was responsible for making the large bull gear that rotated the telescope on its equatorial mount as well as other precision jobs.  Eckel told of the day he met Carnegie. “I was in the machine shop working at a lathe. Carnegie came in on an inspection tour of his project and came up to me at the lathe. Rather than questions about the work he was mostly intrigued by the curls of metal on the floor that came from the lathe cutting tool.”

He also told the story of his difficulty in making the lead screw for the device that produced the very large diffraction grating at Mt. Palomar. It was made in four sections, each 5.5 by 7 inches, to solve the problem of wear on the engraving tool. The excessive length that might be needed for the screw that controlled the engraving tool if they tried to make the full 14 inch surface at one go was an impossibly difficult problem. No grating engine of this size had ever been made before. This large grating surface was necessary to take full advantage of the light gathering capability of the Hale telescope’s 200 inch diameter. Nearly every observation made by large telescopes involves the use of a diffracting device to examine the spectral characteristics of the observed object. For those not familiar with the history of large telescopes the Hale instrument dominated astronomical research from it inauguration in 1948 until the Keck was put into service in Hawaii in 1993. The earlier Russian BTA-6 which was larger never achieved successful operation.

I hate to end on a negative note but the story does have a coda and it’s not so nice. Eckel had three children. I was able to track down some of his relatives and eventually found a grandson in North Carolina. I placed a call to the business where he worked and spoke to his boss. The grandson was busy and couldn’t come to the phone. I explained my mission and left a message for him to call. I wanted to give him the information that I had which I presumed he would never have heard. He did not call back and I can’t find my notes which would allow me to repeat my efforts.

1In about 1620 E. Gunter and W. Oughtred of Cambridge produced what today we would recognize as a slide rule computing device based on the work of John Napier. Wikipedia notes that H. Coggeshall designed a slide rule device for the measurement of timber in 1677; however, Samuel Pepys notes in his journal that he came into possession of a slide rule device for computing ship construction materials, including timber, much earlier – about 1666.   
                        
 2Born in Illinois, USA in 1893 to Albert Edward Eckel and Ida Lill Wilson. Arthur Frederick Eckel married Myrtle Elizabeth Scott and had 3 children. He passed away on 22 Jun 1960 in Burbank, Los Angeles, California, USA.