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 Wilson Alwyn "Snowflake" Bentley (February 9, 1865 – December 23, 1931), born in Jericho, Vermont, 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.
[edit] BiographyBentley was born in February in 1865. He 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 5,000 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 have been requested by academic institutions worldwide. 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. His other publications include the entry on "snow" in the 14th Edition Encyclopædia Britannica.[1] 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. A portion of this collection has been digitized and organized into a digital library. [edit] Popular cultureWilson Bentley is referred to in the song "Black and blue" by Tilly and the Wall, an indie pop group, on their 2006 album Bottoms of Barrels. The Caldecott Medal winner in 1999 for the best illustrated children's book was Snowflake Bentley, which remembers the life of Wilson Bentley. [edit] Bibliography
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