The Snowflake Man of Vermont

No two snowflakes are alike.  Everyone knows that, yes?  It's a fact I've known since I was at least 10 years old, maybe even younger.  And I grew up in Australia, where we didn't even *have* snow.  Which might, come to think of it, explain why I was so fascinated.

So it's something we all know.  But I bet you don't know why we know.  It's largely because of this man:

Wilson Alwyn Bentley was only 20 when he took the word's first ever photo of a snowflake.  He was just a farmer, from a tiny town in Vermont, but had developed a curiosity about snow after his mother bought him a microscope. Initially he made sketches, eventually moving on to photographs when his father bought him a camera.  You can read all about him, as I have been doing this morning, in this piece by Keith C. Heidorn.  It's a great article; I love the details in this description of his methods for collecting and transporting his specimens:


What he found worked best was to capture the crystals on a cool velvet-covered tray. Taking care not to melt the crystal with his breathe, he identified a suitable subject and lifted it onto a pre-cooled slide with a thin wood splint from his mother’s broom and nudged it into place with a turkey feather. The slide was then carried into his photographic shed and placed under the microscope. The back-lit image was focused using a system of strings and pulleys he devised to accommodate his mittened hands. 


He developed his own post-production techniques (which included manually scraping layers of black emulsion from the negatives with a pen-knife) and had a 7-year dalliance with raindrops, too; capturing their imprints in a shallow pan of flour and keeping meticulous records in his journal about the size and nature of the drops themselves, as well as the rainstorms they came from  and the  surrounding conditions which produced them.

He didn't just record these observations, he also analysed them in painstakingly enormous detail, forming what were eventually proven to be robust scientific theories about cloud physics and meteorology; concluding, for instance, that the basic shape of a snowflake (hexagonal, star, etc) was determined by temperature at which is was formed.

Despite acquiring what Hiedorn wonderfully describes as "a considerable understanding of snow", Bentley wasn't taken seriously by the scientific community until long after his death.  He was, after all, just a self-educated farmer from Vermont; even his own father told him that his experiments were a waste of time.

It was the beauty of his photographs which captured public interest while he was still alive, leading him to become widely known as The Snowflake Man of Vermont.  The best ones were sought after by artists and jewelery makers, and it's not hard to see why:

Bentley died a few days before Christmas in 1931, of pneumonia contracted while walking home in bad weather.  At his funeral, just as his coffin was laid in the ground, a blanket of snow gently began to fall.