Wilson Bentley

Wilson Alwyn "Snowflake" Bentley (1865 – 1931), born in Jericho, Vermont, USA, is the first known photographer of snowflakes. He perfected a process of catching flakes on black velvet in such a way that their images could be captured before they either melted or sublimated.

Biography

Bentley first became interested in snow crystals as a teenager on his family farm. He tried to draw what he saw through an old microscope given to him by his mother when he was fifteen. The snowflakes were too complex to record before they melted, so he attached a bellows camera to a compound microscope and, after much experimentation, photographed his first snowflake on January 15 1885.

He would capture over 5000 images of crystals in his lifetime. Each crystal was caught on a blackboard and transferred rapidly to a microscope slide. Even at subzero temperatures, snowflakes are ephemeral because they sublimate. Bentley's work can be seen as occupying the intersection of the arts and the sciences.

Bentley poetically described snowflakes as "tiny miracles of beauty" and snow crystals as "ice flowers." Despite these poetic descriptions, Bentley brought a highly objective eye to his work, similar to the German photographer Karl Blossfeldt (1865–1932) who photographed seeds, seed pods, and foliage.

Bentley's work gained attention in the last few years of the nineteenth century. Harvard Mineralogical Museum acquired some of his photomicrographs. In collaboration with George Henry Perkins, professor of natural history at the University of Vermont, Bentley published an article in which he argued that no two snowflakes were alike. This concept caught the public imagination and he published other articles in magazines, including National Geographic, Nature, Popular Science, and Scientific American. His photographs were requested by academic institutions worldwide. (Note that Nancy Knight, a snow researcher from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, published an 1988 article entitled, No two alike?, featuring a photograph of two virtually identical snowflakes.)

In 1931 Bentley worked with William J. Humphreys of the U.S. Weather Bureau to publish Snow Crystals, a monograph illustrated with 2,500 photographs.

Bentley also photographed all forms of ice and natural water formations including clouds and fog. He was the first American to record raindrop sizes and was one of the first cloud physicists.

He died of pneumonia at his farm on December 23, 1931. Wilson A. Bentley was memorialized in the naming of a science center in his memory at Johnson State College in Johnson, Vermont.

The broadest collection of Bentley's photographs is held by the Jericho Historical Society in his home town, Jericho, Vermont.

Bentley donated his collection of original glass-plate photomicrographs of snow crystals to the Buffalo Museum of Science (http://www.sciencebuff.org/). A portion of this collection has been digitized and organized into a digital library (http://www.bentley.sciencebuff.org/).

Wilson Bentley is referred to in a song by Tilly and the Wall, an indie pop group from Omaha, Nebraska. The song, "Black and Blue", can be found on their 2006 album Bottoms of Barrels.

Bibliography

• Thompson, Jean M., Illustrated by Bentley, Wilson A. Water Wonders Every Child Should Know (Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1913
• Bentley, Wilson A. The Guide to Nature (1922)
• Bentley, Wilson A. 'The Magic of Snow and Dew', National Geographic, 1923.
• Bentley, Wilson A.; Humphreys, William J. Snow Crystals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931)
• Knight, N. (1988) "No two alike?" Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 69(5):496

Other reading

• Blanchard, Duncan. The Snowflake Man, A Biography of Wilson A. Bentley, (Blacksburg, VA: McDonald and Woodward, 1998) ISBN 0-939923-71-8

References

• [JHS] Wilson Snowflake Bentley – Photographer of Snowflakes (Jericho Historical Society, 2004). Retrieved July 26 2005.
• Martin, Jacqueline Briggs; Illustrated by Mary Azarian. Snowflake Bentley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1998) ISBN 0-395-86162-4
• Moreno, Fred. 'Wilson Bentley: The Man Who Studied Snowflakes', Update (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, June/July/August 2005) pp. 8–9.

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