International orange
is a color used in the aerospace industry to set objects apart from their surroundings, similar to safety orange, but deeper and with a more reddish tone.
is a color used in the aerospace industry to set objects apart from their surroundings, similar to safety orange, but deeper and with a more reddish tone.
In an odd twist of linguistic history, many languages have no real name for the color orange. In English, for example, the hue was know just as "red-yellow" until the orange fruit became widely available. That's not to say the color has had no part to play in history.
The color is of course associated with the sixteenth century monarch, William of Orange, who helped establish the Netherlands as an independent state. In response to that history, the Dutch flag originally consisted of horizontal bands of orange, white and blue. But in the 1600s orange dyes were notoriously unstable and tended to turn red over time. Eventually the Dutch simply changed the top stripe to be red as opposed to orange but some of the colonies they established before the change still reference the original flag. New York City, for example, was established by the Dutch as New Amsterdam in 1664 and it's flag remains a variation on the original Dutch flag with vertical bands of blue, white and orange.
The Advanced Crew Escape Suits pressure suits worn by NASA astronauts and the previous Launch Entry Suit use this color, as opposed to the lighter tone of safety orange used by the United States Air Force's high-altitude suits. This was also planned for the Constellation Space Suit systems that were to be flight-ready by 2015.
The Bell X-1, the first airplane to break the sound barrier, was also painted in International Orange.
The tone of international orange used to paint the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California is slightly lighter than the standard International orange used by military contractors and in engineering, thus increasing its visibility to ships, but darker than the one used in aerospace. The international orange paint used on the Golden Gate Bridge is specially formulated to protect the bridge from the danger of rust from salt spray off the ocean, and from the moisture of the San Francisco fog that frequently rolls in from the Pacific Ocean through the Golden Gate to San Francisco Bay. The 25 de Abril Bridge in Lisbon, Portugal also uses this color.
Its paint is the same International Orange color as the famous Golden Gate Bridge, and the design is similar as well to the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. Both the Bay Bridge and the 25 de Abril Bridge were built by the same company.
Planned as an antenna for telecommunications and brightly colored in accordance with the time's Aviation Law, the tower's two panoramic observatories are mostly frequented by tourists today; the tower constitutes a clear reference point in the center's chaotic skyline, forming a strong landmark, both night and day.
Apple Watch Ultra features a high-contrast international orange action button.
The World Football League used international orange (instead of the traditional white) for the stripes on their footballs. The league also painted a short international orange mark on the field at the two-yard line.
Schneider National paints its trucks/tractors/trailers "international safety orange" (Omaha orange, PMS 165).
