Invisible warships: When magicians tried to deceive the enemy at sea
Invisible warships
On 15 September 1915, the London newspaper Globe carried an intriguing report beneath the headline ‘Invisible Warships’. The United States, still neutral in the European war, was experimenting with ways of concealing its battleships from enemy observation.
American warships were reportedly being painted in irregular spirals and contrasting colours to confuse observers about their outlines. In one experiment, the silhouette of a submarine had been painted onto a destroyer, complete with a representation of a periscope on one of its funnels. The disguise was apparently so convincing that the vessel had been mistaken for a submarine at quite a short distance.
Such mistakes were not unknown. The newspaper claimed that British trawlers operating on the Dogger Bank had been mistaken for Japanese destroyers, while German forces had reportedly attached poles to mines in the hope that passing British ships would mistake them for submarine periscopes.
The possibilities were intriguing, but the difficulties considerable. A colour scheme effective under cloudy skies might become useless in bright sunshine. Visibility depended upon the weather, the sea and the angle from which a vessel was observed.
Perhaps, the newspaper suggested, the answer lay with two men whose business was making the impossible appear possible:
“The greatest experts in making substantial things invisible are people like David Devant and Ching Soo, whose apparatus would probably not stand the strain of naval usage!”
The reference was to David Devant, Britain’s celebrated illusionist, and Chung Ling Soo, the American-born magician William Ellsworth Robinson, who performed disguised as a Chinese conjurer. Both were famous for feats of disappearance and transformation. Unfortunately, techniques that worked beneath theatrical lighting, before an audience seated in predictable positions, were unlikely to prove as effective on the open sea.
The Globe was sceptical about naval invisibility. Its writer concluded that making one’s own ships disappear was a secondary consideration. The principal objective was to make the enemy’s ships disappear — by sending them to the bottom.
It was a humorous observation, but the problem was deadly serious. Within two years, an American who understood both the chemistry of paint and the methods of conjuring would see his camouflage designs applied to vessels of the United States Navy.
The chemist and the conjurer
The First World War had transformed the threat facing ships at sea. German submarines could attack with little warning, and a torpedo accurately aimed at an unsuspecting merchantman might send it to the bottom within minutes.
Camouflage offered two forms of protection: concealment, reducing the distance at which a ship could be detected, and deception, making it difficult to determine its size, distance, course or speed. A submarine commander needed to estimate where his target would be when a torpedo arrived. A mistake in judging its heading or speed could cause an attack to fail.
The British marine artist Norman Wilkinson would become famous for developing dazzle camouflage in 1917, using bold, angular patterns to distort a ship’s apparent form. But across the Atlantic, American artists and scientists were already exploring their own methods.
Among them was Dr Maximilian Toch.
Born in New York in 1864, Toch had built a distinguished and unusually varied career. An industrial chemist, president of Toch Brothers and chief chemist of the Standard Varnish Works, he was a recognised authority on paints and protective coatings.
He taught the chemistry of artistic painting at the National Academy of Design and used chemical analysis, microscopy and X-rays to investigate the authenticity of Old Master paintings. In 1931, he caused a stir by claiming that only one of the more than thirty paintings attributed to Rembrandt in New York’s Metropolitan Museum was genuine. His conclusions were disputed, but attracted international attention.
Yet science was only one side of Toch’s character. He was also an enthusiastic amateur magician.
A profile published in The New Yorker in October 1931 described him as a short, portly, good-humoured man with thick grey hair and an extraordinary range of interests. In his private workshop, he pursued photography, X-ray techniques, invisible writing and conjuring.
An active member of the Society of American Magicians, he regularly devised new tricks for its meetings. His interest extended to the practical construction and decoration of magical apparatus.
In September 1942, Toch contributed an article, ‘Finishing Magical Apparatus’, to The Sphinx. Alongside advice on applying enamel paints, he discussed how colour affected visibility. Violet, indigo blue and darker greens were among the least conspicuous colours at a distance, while yellow, orange and scarlet attracted attention. Poorly combined colours, he warned, could disturb the eye.
These observations were intended for magicians decorating their apparatus, but concerned the same problems of visibility and contrast that had occupied Toch during the First World War.
The editor of The Sphinx noted that Toch’s advice had been sought by the camouflage corps of the United States Navy, praising his scientific expertise and knowledge of magic together.
There is no evidence that Toch derived his naval camouflage from a particular conjuring technique. His ideas also drew upon scientific theories of protective coloration, particularly the work of the American artist and naturalist Abbott Handerson Thayer. Nevertheless, here was a practising magician with the technical expertise to contribute to military deception.
Unlike the Globe‘s imagined consultation with Devant and Chung Ling Soo, Toch’s involvement went considerably beyond speculation.
Painting the American fleet
When the United States entered the war in April 1917, its naval authorities began investigating ways to protect vessels against submarine attack.
Toch was already familiar with naval paints, having worked on their composition and protective properties. He now turned his attention from preserving a ship’s surfaces to changing its appearance.
His camouflage combined contrasting colours in irregular patterns. A contemporary description identifies four principal shades: very light blue-grey, dark blue-grey, dark green and light pink-purple. Darker colours predominated towards the lower hull, while lighter shades appeared against the sky. Large patches and sweeping lines interrupted the ship’s natural outline.
The scheme had two objectives. At greater distances, the colours might merge into the sea and sky, reducing visibility. At closer range, the patterns would make it harder to judge the vessel’s heading.
On 27 June 1917, the Navy’s Bureau of Construction and Repair authorised comparative experiments involving nine vessels, including ships painted in the systems proposed by William Mackay, George de Forest Brush and Toch, alongside conventional grey.
One of the ships selected for the Toch System was USS Courtney.
Originally a commercial fishing vessel named Warren J. Courtney, she had been acquired for wartime patrol and escort duties. Commissioned in August 1917, she was painted in an extraordinary combination of stripes and loops of dark green, dark red, grey and white.
Instead of a continuous grey outline, observers encountered contrasting shapes and colours intended to confuse their interpretation of the vessel’s appearance.
But an ingenious design was of little value unless it worked at sea.
In September 1917, Captain Thomas P. Magruder, commanding Squadron Four of the United States Atlantic Fleet Patrol Force, submitted a report comparing the visibility of differently painted vessels during their passage across the Atlantic.
His observations covered changing sunlight, cloud cover, sea conditions and viewing angles. Sometimes lighter camouflage schemes were less conspicuous against the sky. At other times, conventional grey was clearly superior.
Magruder was unimpressed by Toch’s contribution. His verdict on Courtney was unequivocal:
“The COURTNEY, painted according to the Toch system showed up plainly under all conditions.”
He concluded that standard grey was generally preferable. Patterns intended to conceal ships could actually make them more conspicuous.
It was a poor result for Toch’s design, although Magruder’s report had an important limitation. His flagship, USS Wakiva, lacked a rangefinder, so he could not assess whether the patterns interfered with accurate rangefinding. Nor did a ship’s conspicuousness necessarily establish whether an observer could correctly determine its direction.
Other observations were more encouraging.
USS Kajeruna, a former private yacht commissioned for patrol duties, carried another version of the Toch System. In October 1917, observers aboard USS Palmer reported that she was less conspicuous than several other vessels under bright sunlight at approximately five miles.
A subsequent report from USS Montgomery likewise considered her less visible than another vessel under comparison.
The ships differed in size and shape, and the weather and lighting conditions varied. Nevertheless, these observations suggest that Toch’s camouflage was not uniformly ineffective.
His designs were applied beyond the original trials. Naval camouflage researcher Everett Warner later identified the transports USS Huron and USS Aeolus as having received the Toch System in January 1918.
By the autumn of 1917, Toch’s scheme was among several officially recognised camouflage systems available to shipowners. It had progressed from proposal to practical application and naval assessment.
For an amateur magician, this was an unusual achievement.
Toch came to believe that the greatest value of camouflage lay not in concealment but in distortion. In a retrospective account published in 1931, he described accompanying a submarine during simulated attacks against a camouflaged vessel named Parthenia.
He claimed that the ship’s appearance caused errors in estimating its position and direction, preventing the submarine from scoring a torpedo hit even at comparatively close range.
The results remain Toch’s own testimony. Independent naval records confirming the exercise and his measurements have not been established. Nevertheless, the principle was sound: misleading an enemy about a ship’s course might offer a better prospect of survival than trying to make it disappear.
By 1918, American naval camouflage was becoming more systematic. Everett Warner and other specialists developed new patterns, while British dazzle painting, associated with Wilkinson, gained wider acceptance.
Toch’s system was gradually superseded. It did not become the standard American scheme, nor can he be credited with inventing dazzle camouflage. Yet his contribution was real: his designs reached operational vessels, were assessed by naval officers and briefly formed part of an officially accepted programme.
Toch continued his scientific and magical interests after the Armistice. He died in New York in May 1946, aged 81. Remembered principally as a chemist, inventor and controversial investigator of paintings, his naval camouflage work and parallel life as a magician deserve more attention than they have received.
Horace Goldin: the disappearing soldier
While Toch was experimenting with coloured warships in the Atlantic, another magician was attempting to persuade American military authorities that an illusion could protect soldiers on the battlefield.
Horace Goldin was one of the most successful professional illusionists of his generation. Born in Warsaw in 1873, he made his reputation through fast-moving, spectacular stage magic and later became particularly associated with sawing a woman in half.
In 1918, Goldin found himself stranded in Honolulu, unable to obtain passage back to mainland America.
His predicament inspired an unusual idea. If he could invent something sufficiently valuable to the United States Army, perhaps the military authorities would help him get home.
In his autobiography, It’s Fun to Be Fooled (1937), Goldin described devising an apparatus that could apparently make soldiers invisible. According to his account, the idea came to him during the night, and within two days he had constructed a working demonstration in his hotel bedroom.
His first audience was a friendly American sergeant. Goldin placed two toy soldiers in the room and made them apparently disappear, before causing them to reappear.
The sergeant was impressed enough to bring the invention to the attention of senior officers, including Brigadier-General A. P. Blocksom and Lieutenant-Colonel Charles G. Mettler.
Goldin claimed that he successfully repeated the demonstration for them.
ILLUSIONIST HAS DEVICE TO AID NATION'S FIGHTERS DEMONSTRATION OF CAMOUFLAGE TO DECEIVE FOE IS GIVEN BY HORACE GOLDIN, WHO WILL LAY PLANS BEFORE WASHINGTON
He suggested that the device might conceal snipers, men in trenches and even motorcycles from enemy observation. In his more ambitious descriptions, groups of soldiers could approach enemy positions without being seen.
Such claims went far beyond making two toy soldiers disappear in a hotel room. But Goldin’s autobiography reproduces a document that lends the episode greater substance.
Dated 8 July 1918 and attributed to Lieutenant-Colonel Mettler of the Hawaiian Ordnance Depot, the letter acknowledged that he had inspected Goldin’s illusion for concealing individual soldiers near the firing line. It stated:
“The device operated satisfactorily on a small scale in a room”
Mettler reportedly considered that it might have military value.
The original letter has not been independently examined, but its reproduction is significant. It describes an apparently successful small-scale demonstration, not the deployment of an invisibility device on the battlefield.
Goldin’s invention also attracted contemporary press coverage. In September 1918, American newspapers reported his proposal, with one article appearing under the headline ‘Mystic Goldin Devises Trick to Baffle Hun’. The reports named the officers who had examined the device, establishing that the story was circulating publicly long before Goldin published his autobiography.
Goldin eventually secured passage to San Francisco and intended to present his invention to officials in Washington. According to his account, he arrived in the capital on 11 November 1918 — the day the Armistice brought the fighting on the Western Front to an end.
The timing could hardly have been worse for an inventor seeking to persuade the military of an urgent wartime requirement.
Nothing came of the proposal. Years later, Goldin claimed to have written to the American authorities again, asking whether they intended to use his invention and seeking payment for it. He received a reply stating that no record of the transaction could be found.
By the time he published his autobiography in 1937, he was claiming to be negotiating with the British War Ministry about its possible future application.
There is no independent evidence that the British authorities adopted his device. Nevertheless, Goldin evidently continued to regard his invention as a serious military proposition.
He died in London in August 1939, only days before the outbreak of another European war. By then, another American magician was already attracting headlines with an even more ambitious proposal. Where Goldin had offered to conceal individual soldiers, Joseph Dunninger claimed that he could make an entire battleship disappear.
Joseph Dunninger: the disappearing battleship
Joseph Dunninger was one of America’s best-known mentalists, with a successful career entertaining wealthy private audiences, exposing fraudulent mediums and demonstrating apparently extraordinary powers of thought-reading.
He was also exceptionally skilled at attracting publicity.
In April 1939, American newspapers reported that Dunninger had developed a method of making warships invisible and intended to demonstrate it to the United States Navy.
Six months later, The New Yorker published an account beneath the heading ‘No Mirrors’.
According to the magazine, Dunninger had been invited to Washington during the preceding spring, where he had caused a small model battleship to disappear before senior naval officers.
The Navy was reportedly considering whether the technique could be adapted to actual warships.
Dunninger claimed that his invention could render a battleship invisible beyond approximately 200 yards. At closer range, the vessel would appear only as a faint streak. The necessary equipment, he suggested, would be considerably smaller than the ship itself and relatively inexpensive compared with the cost of modern military hardware.
The method supposedly combined several complex principles already used in stage illusions.
He was particularly emphatic about one point:
“There are no mirrors.”
Quite how a technique demonstrated on a small model might be reproduced on a full-sized warship at sea was left unexplained.
The contemporary reports establish that Dunninger made these claims, but do not independently identify the naval officers who supposedly witnessed the demonstration. No official assessment confirming a successful test has been established.
Dunninger nevertheless continued promoting the invention.
In 1940, a remarkable publicity photograph appeared under the caption ‘The Ship That Isn’t There’. It survives in the Library of Congress, within the New York World-Telegram photographic collection.
View the original photograph on the Library of Congress website.
The photograph shows Dunninger seated beside a framed picture of an apparently empty sea. According to the accompanying press caption, the picture contained a ship concealed by an invisible paint supposedly invented by Dunninger and supplied to the American government.
The ship was said to be in the centre of the picture.
It was a striking publicity device, if hardly proof that Dunninger had developed an effective naval camouflage paint.
By this stage, his claims had also become associated with Horace Goldin.
An account attributed to The New York Times of 31 August 1940, subsequently reproduced in a later publication, reported Dunninger’s suggestion that invisible British aircraft might be employing apparatus developed by Goldin before his death.
The original newspaper report has not yet been independently checked, but the attribution is intriguing. Goldin had publicly discussed his military invisibility device in his 1937 autobiography, two years before Dunninger’s battleship proposal.
In November 1941, The New Yorker returned to the subject in a lengthy profile of Dunninger by E. J. Kahn Jr.
Dunninger now claimed that he had corresponded with an English magician, since deceased, who had shown great interest in his invention. He speculated that the magician might have understood its workings and passed the information to the British government.
Goldin is a possible candidate, but the correspondent was not identified. No surviving letters have been established, and there is no independent evidence of an associated British military programme.
Dunninger remained confident in his invention, suggesting that its underlying principle resembled that of his disappearing-elephant illusion.
But the magazine noted an awkward fact. Despite the publicity, he had not yet made a real battleship — or even a canoe — disappear.
The claims continued to follow him after the war.
In July 1949, TIME reported that Dunninger had attempted to interest the Navy in his invention during the conflict. A Navy spokesman was quoted as dismissing the proposal:
“Wildly fantastic. We refuse to be party to a cheap publicity stunt.”
It was a rather different official response from the enthusiastic reception suggested by Dunninger’s earlier publicity.
There is no convincing evidence that his system was ever developed for operational use.
Jasper Maskelyne and naval deception
During the Second World War, the British magician Jasper Maskelyne worked on maritime deception in the Middle East. In 1943, he helped develop Operation Sly Bob, an experimental dummy submarine approximately 180 feet long, constructed at Ataka on the Gulf of Suez with assistance from the 85th Camouflage Company. Modelled on HMS Ursula, the floating decoy employed canvas, metal framing and ballasted oil drums. Initial observations suggested that it could deceive an observer at a distance, but the structure proved vulnerable to rough weather and was eventually dismantled.
The art of making ships disappear
The Globe journalist who suggested consulting Devant and Chung Ling Soo in 1915 had identified a genuine connection between conjuring and military deception. Both depended upon manipulating what an observer believed they could see.
Goldin demonstrated a small-scale illusion, Dunninger promised invisible battleships, and Toch devised camouflage that was actually applied to American naval vessels. Maskelyne’s later work showed how the same principles could disguise a vessel’s identity.
Making a warship truly invisible remained beyond their powers. Making an enemy misjudge its appearance, course or purpose was another matter.
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