Why are ships painted RED below the waterline?

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com The next time you stand at a harbor, or see a great cargo vessel lifted up in a dry dock, look at the very bottom of it. Below the line where the water comes up to, the whole curved belly of the ship is painted a bold rusty red. Up above, the hull may be black, or white, or gray. But down below the waterline, on ship after ship, all over the world, that same deep red. Once you notice it, it is everywhere, and it does make you wonder.So why red, and why only on the bottom? Is it meant to frighten off the creatures of the sea? Is it camouflage? A warning of some kind? The truth has nothing at all to do with how the ship looks. That red is the trace of an old, old fight against the creatures of the sea, a clever bit of chemistry that grew out of that fight, and a deep respect for the old ways that kept the color long after the reason for it changed.I am Elias Yoder. I am Amish, and I farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Now I will say plainly, I am no sailor and no shipbuilder. The largest boat I have set foot in is a flat little rowboat on a farm pond. So I am not going to pretend to be a man of the sea. I am a farmer who saw that red bottom one day and got curious about why it was there. And when I followed the answer down, I found it was built almost entirely out of a kind of plain sense I have used my whole life on the farm, against rust and rot and creeping ruin.What I walk you through:✔ The old enemy called fouling: how algae, weed, barnacles, and the wood-boring shipworm would cover and ruin a wooden hull ✔ Why a fouled hull was a true disaster, adding dead weight and drag until a ship could lose a great part of her speed, which at sea could mean losing a battle, a trade race, or a life ✔ The plain wisdom underneath it: it is easier to stop a creeping ruin before it starts than to fight it once it has taken hold, the same as greasing a tool, tarring a fence post, or oiling a harness ✔ The first fix in the late 1700s: nailing thin sheets of copper over the wooden hull, since copper makes its surface poisonous to barnacles, weed, and worm ✔ Why the new iron and steel ships could not use copper sheets, because copper against iron in salt water sets off a reaction that rusts the iron fiercely ✔ The clever answer: grinding a copper compound into paint and brushing it on, doing the old job in a new and safer way (antifouling paint) ✔ Why that paint came out red, simply because the copper compound doing the work is naturally a rusty red. The famous color was never chosen. It is the true color of the medicine ✔ Why red still rules today, partly tradition, partly that many paints still lean on copper, and partly a real practical bonus: the bold red band against a dark hull makes an easy line to read how deep and how heavy the ship is sitting in the waterThe plain truth underneath it all: that red bottom is the last red trace of a three-hundred-year fight against the creeping life of the sea, the color of the very medicine that kept the ships clean and fast, carried right down to our own day. There is nothing in it a careful farmer did not already know in his own way, fighting rust and rot of his own.This is one of a series on Elias Yoder Explains, where I take the ordinary things of daily life that everybody handles and nobody really understands, and explain them plainly, the way the careful old folks understood them.Tell me in the comments below. Had you ever noticed those red bottoms and wondered what they were for, or did you see them a hundred times and never once ask? And if any of you are sailors, or worked in the shipyards, or painted a hull yourself, I would be glad to hear from you. If I have got a corner of it wrong, set me straight and teach the rest of us. I read every single one.Next video: how an enormous ship made of iron and steel, far heavier than any stone, manages to float at all, when a single nail of that same iron sinks straight to the bottom. Subscribe so you do not miss it.#RedShips #Antifouling #HowThingsWork #AmishWisdom #PennsylvaniaDutch #Maritime #Ships #ShipBottom #PlainSense #CopperPaint #MaritimeHistory #Barnacles #SimpleExplained #EliasYoderExplains #EverydayHistory