Wilson Alwyn Bentley (February 9, 1865 – December 23, 1931), also known as Snowflake Bentley, was an American meteorologist and photographer, who was the first known person to take detailed photographs of snowflakes and record their features. 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.
Kenneth G. Libbrecht notes that the techniques used by Bentley to photograph snowflakes are essentially the same as those used today, and that while the quality of his photographs reflects the technical limitations of the equipment of the era, “he did it so well that hardly anybody bothered to photograph snowflakes for almost 100 years”. 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.
Table of Contents
- 1 Biography
- 1.1 The Snowflake Man: A Biography of Wilson A. Bentley
- 1.2 My Brother Loved Snowflakes: The Story of Wilson A. Bentley, the Snowflake Man
- 1.3 Wilson Bentley Snowflakes in Motion
- 1.4 Ice Wilson Bentley
- 1.5 Snowflakes in Photographs (Dover Pictorial Archive)
- 1.6 Snow Crystals (Dover Pictorial Archive)
- 1.7 Snowflake Bentley
- 1.8 Curious About Snow (Smithsonian)
- 1.9 The Art of the Snowflake: A Photographic Album
- 1.10 When Love Comes Knocking
- 1.11 More interesting reads:
Biography
Bentley was born on February 9, 1865, in Jericho, Vermont. He first became keen in snow crystals as a teenager upon his family farm. “Always, right from the coming on it was the snowflakes that fascinated me most,” he said. “The farm folks taking place in this country distress the winter, but I was supremely happy.” He tried to magnetism what he wise saying through an antiquated microscope definite to him by his mom when he was fifteen. The snowflakes were too puzzling to record previously they melted, so he attached a bellows camera to a combined microscope and, after much experimentation, photographed his first snowflake upon January 15, 1885. He captured higher than 5,000 images of crystals in his lifetime. Each crystal was caught on a blackboard and transferred sharply to a microscope slide. Even at subzero temperatures, snowflakes are ephemeral because they sublimate.
Bentley described snowflakes as “tiny miracles of beauty” and snow crystals as “ice flowers.” Despite these poetic descriptions, Bentley brought an empirical method to his work. In collaboration behind George Henry Perkins, professor of natural chronicles at the University of Vermont, Bentley published an article in which he argued that no two snow crystals 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 as soon as William J. Humphreys of the U.S. Weather Bureau to publish Snow Crystals, a monograph illustrated like 2,500 photographs. His other publications tally up the admittance on “snow” in the fourteenth edition of Encyclopædia Britannica. Bentley along with photographed everything forms of ice and natural water formations including clouds and fog. He was the first American to LP raindrop sizes, and was one of the first cloud physicists.
He died of pneumonia at his farm upon December 23, 1931. Bentley was memorialized in the naming of a science center in his memory at Johnson State College in Johnson, Vermont. His book Snow Crystals was published by McGraw-Hill sharply before his death, and is yet in print today. Bentley’s lifelong house is listed upon the National Register of Historic Places.
More interesting reads:
- None Found
Last update 2021-08-06