The term camouflage comes from the French word camoufler meaning "to blind or veil." Camouflage, also called protective concealment, means to disguise an object, in plain sight, in order to conceal it from something or someone.
In the late 1800s, an American artist named Abbott Thayer made an important observation about animals in nature that became a useful tool in developing modern camouflage. After studying wildlife, Thayer noticed that the coloring of many animals graduated from dark, on their backs, to almost white on their bellies. This is an important property that is very useful in modern camouflage. This graduation from dark to light breaks up the surface of an object and makes it harder to see the object as one thing. The object loses its three-dimensional qualities and appears flat. This tendency to break up and flatten the surface of an object also appears in the artistic movement, Cubism, which was occurring during this same time period.
Camouflage, as we know it today, was born in 1915 when the French army created a new unit called the camouflage division. Artists were among the first people the French army called in to help develop camouflage for use during WWI.
