Science: Barnacles Baffled

The Navy announced this week that it has finally solved an old nautical problem: how to keep barnacles off the bottom of a ship. The solution: a new plastic paint which makes bottoms so slick that for at least two years no barnacle can get a foothold.

Barnacles are a serious hindrance to a ship, slowing it down and making it clumsy to handle. Normally a ship must have her hull scraped every six to 18 months. But the new paint, developed by the Navy’s Bureau of Ships, keeps a ship’s bottom whistle-clean for two to five years. A brown, syrupy compound of cuprous oxide and synthetic resins, it is sprayed on hot (300°F.), forms a coat ten times as thick as ordinary paint.

Most of the Navy’s big ships have been coated with it. (It does not work on wood bottoms.) The Navy considers its invention so important that, to keep the formula a secret, it manufactures the paint in its own plants at Mare Island, Calif, and Norfolk, Va.