Naturalist's Almanac

On January 15, 1885, Snowflake Bentley of Jericho, Vermont, took his first photograph of a snowflake. He was just shy of 20 years old, but he had already been studying snowflakes for five years. He had gotten hooked on them at age 15, when he first saw one through a microscope his mother had given him.

He spent three winters trying to draw snowflakes, but they melted before he could capture all the details. So he talked his parents into buying him a special camera-microscope combination that he theorized could take photographs of snowflakes. It took him two more winters, but he finally got that first photograph.

Forty-six years and more than 5,000 photographs later, Wilson Alwyn Bentley, who died at age 66, had established himself as a world authority on snowflakes. One way to appreciate his accomplishment is to go outdoors during a snowstorm and try to catch, magnify, and examine some snowflakes yourself.

You'll find that it's challenging. But I've discovered a quick and easy way to get a look at some occasional snowflakes. I just turn my binoculars upside down, which changes them from long-distance magnifiers to close-up magnifiers, and look at the snowflakes that fall on the dark sleeve of my winter jacket.

One of the first things I learned from my own observations is that Snowflake Bentley wasn't photographing whole snowflakes. He was photographing individual snow crystals from the groups of crystals that we call snowflakes. A snowflake is an amorphous clump, while a snow crystal is an exquisite six-sided structure.

According to the experts who followed Bentley, snow crystals come in seven different shapes, but the shape I notice most often is the one Bentley himself saw most often. It's a stellar crystal — as opposed to a plate, column, needle, spatial dendrite, capped column, or irregular crystal. A stellar crystal looks like a child's paper cut-out — a lacy, six-pointed star.

For me it's enough to see a few transient snow crystals through reversed binoculars, but Bentley wanted to study as many as he could, compare them, and learn from them. In the process, he created permanent images that all of us can share.

If you'd like to see some of these images, look for a copy of Snow Crystals, a collection of over 2,000 of Bentley's photographs that was published shortly before he died. They represent Bentley's work at its best — science so good it's art.

MORE INFORMATION

Snowflake Bentley
http://snowflakebentley.com

This is the Jericho (Vermont) Historical Society's Web site. Snowflake Bentley lived in Jericho, and the Historical Society has quite a bit of archival material by or about him. Their attractive Web site includes excellent photos of Bentley and some of his snowflakes. Under Resources you will find the text of articles written by Bentley himself 1910-1925, a list of books about him, numerous links to other Web sites, and answers to Frequently Asked Questions. They offer online shopping for many--some of them unique--snowflake-related items from their gift shop, plus a virtual tour of their museum, plus an online newsletter, plus a lively and interesting message board.

Bentley Snow Crystal Collection
http://bentley.sciencebuff.org/index.htm

This Buffalo Museum of Science site offers a digital library of Snowflake Bentley’s original images just as they were taken. It also includes a biography, an explanation of his photographic process, and other resource material. I found the background on how this digital library was produced quite interesting.

Wilson Bentley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_Bentley

The Wikipedia article on Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley includes a brief biography with several links to related Wikipedia articles. The ones I found most interesting were MICROSCOPES (especially HISTORY OF), the year 1885, and WILLIAM D. HUMPHREYS, a physicist who helped Bentley get his photographs published. It also offers several snowflake photos, plus a bibliography, plus a link back to the Jericho Historical Society’s Web site. At the very bottom of the page are links to the categories Bentley is included in, the most fascinating of which is AUTODIDACTS....