In as much as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and wife in Sarajevo was not the sole catalyst and cause of the outbreak of World War, I appreciated the message of a documentary produced a few years ago that conveyed that those preceding years were not just a prelude, the eve of war. Aside from advances in mechanization, transportation and the migration of populations from rural to urban-areas, a singular event did lead to the diversion of much of that new and untempered energy towards the build-up of navies and military power: shortly after the invention of the airplane and the science of aerodynamics, French inventor and aeronaut Louis Blรฉriot successfully flew across the English Channel (La Manche) in the summer of 1909.
Though celebrated on both sides for this great achievement (Blรฉriot was encouraged by a £1000 prize offered by a British tabloid to whomever could manage such an impossible task), more sombre-thinkers realised that this feat meant the end of Britian’s imperviousness, separated from the rest of the violent continent by a natural moat and an admiralty unmatched. Seeking to exploit this newly discovered weakness, other nations quickly sought to bolster their sea-power, and England wanted desperately to maintain its supremacy, whatever might attack from above. Defensive or offensive, sadly, such contingencies ache to be used. Inspired by the disruption patterns in Nature, the zebra and the great spotted and striped cats, a group of artists, under the leadership of Norman Wilkinson, were commissioned to disguise the fleet in what was known as dazzle camouflage. The striking geometric patterns and colours were not to conceal but rather confuse, by making it difficult to discern speed and heading—making the job of a marksman, whether from sea or air, much more of a challenge, often wasting rounds by misjudging distance. The practise continued until the beginnings of WWII and the advent of radar that replaced range-finding. Pablo Picasso asserted that he and others of the Cubist movement (that occurred around the same time leading up to WWI) but possibly, it was the other way around. I wonder what other seminal events might be bound up in other colourful techniques
