Wilson Bentley

Categories: Vermont history | Autodidacts | 1865 births | 1931 deaths | Meterologists | People from Vermont

Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley (1865–1931), born in Jericho, Vermont, was 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 melted.

Wilson A. 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 evaporate.

Bentley's work attracted attention in the last few years of the century. Harvard Mineralogical Museum acquired some of his photomicrographs. With George Henry Perkins, professor of natural history at the University of Vermont, he 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 article titled No two alike? featuring a photo 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.

The broadest collection of Bentley's photographs is held by the Jericho Historical Society.

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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
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Other reading

  • Blanchard, Duncan. The Snowflake Man, A Biography of Wilson A. Bentley, (Blacksburg, VA: McDonald and Woodward, 1998) ISBN 0939923718
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External links

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References