"British rifle green to rifle black?" Topic

By the Zulu war British rifle uniforms had replaced rifle green with more reliably black dyed uniforms. When exactly did this happen?

I'm not sure about that. In the Winnipeg Rifles museum they have a black 1885 uniform on display. I asked a staff member when they went to black, and he shone a flashlight on the uniform. Damme if it wasn't green after all.

And 1885 was the campaign where they got the nickname 'Little Black Devils'

I was wondering how hard it is to make a true black. Even my black cat's coat has a brownish tinge under intense light.

My understanding was that despite being called "the black mafia" late 19th and 20th Century British Rifle uniforms were a very dark green.
Someone might want to check the dates on coal tar derivative dyes. In the days of vegetable dyes, the tendency was to dye as dark as you could afford and fade through green.

That's my understanding as well – that the green was so dark as to be almost "black."

Jim

Synthetic dyes based on coal tar are termed aniline dyes. In 1856 chemistry student William Henry Perkin discovered by accident mauveine, a purple dye. The synthetic dye industry developed from then, especially in Germany, but it took many years of research and experimentation to work out the full range of modern dyes. I really couldn't say just when a satisfactory deep green or black was developed.

Our perception of color is something of an illusion. Color is just a matter of what portion of the light spectrum a given kind of matter reflects--no light, no color. A true black would reflect no light at all (no matter how strong a light shines on it), so I think it probably does not exist in any absolute sense.

'Black Button Mafia' was what we called them in my day.

Paint them pale green because of bad dye lots and the effects of campaigning. Also things are lighter the farther away they are.

[Edit – I'm parroting.]

You'll also notice smaller figures always look darker than larger ones, even when painted with the same paint.