Snowflake Bentley
One of the greatest joys of childhood is the coveted snow
day—no school, playing outside, a warm hot chocolate at the end of the day. As we reach adulthood, snow days mean
hyperactive kids, frozen pipes, and treacherous road conditions. The excitement fades. Many
years ago, there was a man who maintained a childlike wonder of snow from
boyhood throughout his twilight years. Rather
than catching snowflakes on his tongue as children do, he caught them on film. His name was Snowflake Bentley.
Early Life
Wilson Alwyn Bentley was born on February 9, 1865 on the
family dairy farm outside of Jericho, Vermont. He was interested in nature from an early age.
Nothing captured his attention more than
snow, a fortuitous passion in the Snow Belt, where snowfall averages 120”
annually.[1]
Bentley’s mother, a former schoolteacher
who taught him at home until he was 14, encouraged his interest, despite the skepticism
of his father and brother. For his 15th
birthday, Bentley received an old microscope from his mother’s teaching days,
and he began to study the natural world in closer detail. Snowflakes were the most enthralling specimens
of all:
“Under the microscope, I found
that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty
should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and
no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was
forever lost. Just that much beauty was
gone, without leaving any record behind. I became possessed with a great desire to show
people something of this wonderful loveliness.”[2]
He began by sketching the flakes, but they often melted
before he was done. After three winters, hundreds of sketches, countless lost
snowflakes, and with his mother’s persuasion, Bentley’s father bought him a
camera and microscope that were worth nearly as much as the family farm. The self-taught Bentley invented an apparatus
of microscope, camera, and bellows that he would use for the rest of his photomicrography
career. After a season of failure,
experimenting with stops, exposure, and focus, Bentley had his first success in
1884 at the age of 19.[3]
Following this achievement he said, “I
felt almost like falling to my knees beside the apparatus. I knew then that what I had dreamed of doing
was possible. It was the greatest moment of my life.” [4]
Scientist
Bentley was following in the footsteps of great
scientists. Johannes Kepler first
introduced the snowflake’s shape in his 1611 work, On the Six-Cornered Snowflake. Robert Hooke first illustrated the varied
structures of snow crystals in his 1665 work Micrographia. It was Wilson
Bentley, a teenage farmer with no formal scientific training, who pioneered
photomicrography and took the first picture of an individual snow crystal. Bentley showed a single-minded dedication to
scientific pursuit, working in the cold and snow every winter for decades. As a result, in 1924 he was awarded the first
ever research grant given by the American Meteorological Society for “40 years
of extremely patient work.”[5]
His goal of sharing the beauty of the
natural world with others remained a priority. Over the years, he published
dozens of general interest and technical articles in various publications,
including the New York Times and National Geographic. Clearly, he did not publish for his own
acclaim; in a list of his publications recorded in his notebook, notes like: “Knowledge,
London, 1912, I think” were common.[6]
In addition to his work with snowflakes, Bentley also
researched frost, dew, and raindrop size. He regularly recorded weather records
three times a day, as well as descriptions of 600 auroras over 40 years. He was
“first to deduce that rain in thunderstorms has a dual origin, suggested that
many snow crystals start growing as frozen cloud droplets, came close to
explaining the Bergeron mechanism of rain formation…and proposed what was
probably the first hydrometeor-related explanation for cloud electrification.”[7]
Modern atmospheric scientists have said that Bentley’s work on cloud physics
was decades ahead of his time.
