Once the model was completed, it was taken to a testing theatre, equipped with a periscopic viewing device and changeable seascape backgrounds. The viewer was challenged to estimate the angle of the model as it was positioned on an adjustable platform (as shown in a photograph of Navy camoufleurs Van Buskirk and Kenneth MacIntire ).
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Exhibit of Marine Camouflage in Science, Vol 50 No 1287, c1919, p. 205—
The Brooklyn Museum Quarterly describes a special exhibit held at the museum of models, design. and other objects illustrating the practice and some of the principles of marine camouflage. The exhibition was arranged by the curator of the department of natural science, and was made possible through the interest and cooperation of Mr. William A. Mackay, of the United States Shipping Board, camoufleur of the Second Naval District, and Lieutenants Harold Van Buskirk and Everett L. Warner, of the Camouflage Section, Bureau of Construction and Repair, United States Navy. Numerous other naval officers, members of the American Society of Marine Camoufleurs, and others, also contributed to the success of the exhibit by lending illustrative material.
A aeries of photographs made in the naval laboratories at Washington DC, and Rochester NY, showed successive stages of the experimental work by means of which the colors and patterns employed in the camouflage designs had been arrived at. These illustrations included views of the elaborate periscopic theater at Rochester, in which painted models of ships were tested under conditions which simulated, in all essential respects, the open ocean. The history of marine camouflage was briefly traced by means of labels and colored models, while approved as well as experimental designs of the "low-visibility" type, the British and American "dazzles," and the French system, were shown by means of models, photographs and colored lithographs issued by the Navy Department.
A case in the center of the exhibition room contained a miniature convoy of transports in charge of a cruiser and a flotilla of destroyers, each camouflaged model an exact replica of its namesake, or, rather, the original working model from which the transport or war vessel had been camouflaged. A simple, illuminated theater, equipped with a periscope, enabled visitors to observe a model as if from a submarine point of view, and moreover, demonstrated surprisingly well the distortion and other types of illusion produced by the camoufleur's design.
