The Moiré Effect Lights That Guide Ships Home
EducationTom Scott•494.2K Views
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Editorial Analysis
I'd never heard of moiré effect beacons until I got an email asking me about them. It seemed like a really clever idea - but it was really hard to research. Or at least it was, until I stumbled upon one magic phrase that revealed its history.\n\nIt turns out this thing's called an Inogon leading mark or Inogon light -- Inogon, not Inogen -- and it's a Swedish invention from the 1980s. But there's still a question: why is being used to mark an undersea cable, instead of guiding people home?\n\n(Full disclosure: there were some weird strobing effects from the light that only showed up when I got the footage into the edit, so the image you see here has been digitally stabilised so it appears the same way on screen as it does in person!)\n\nThanks to Andrew Stine for suggesting this!\n\nReferences:\nThe original Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_pattern\nThe patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4629325\nThe US military analysis [PDF]: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a168108.pdf\n\nI'm at http://tomscott.com\non Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomscott\non Facebook at http://facebook.com/tomscott\nand on Snapchat and Instagram as tomscottgo
