Snowflake Bentley

Wilson Alwyn "Snowflake" Bentley (February 9-December 23, 1931) is one of the first known photographers 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.

Kenneth G. Libbrecht, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology and publisher of several popular books illustrating the variety of snowflake forms, notes that the techniques used by Bentley to photograph snowflakes are essentially the same as used today, and whilst the quality of his photographs reflect 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 hometown of 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.

Bentley was born on February 9, 1865, in Jericho, Vermont. 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 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 more than 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 are sublime.

Bentley poetically described snowflakes at "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 who photographed seeds, seed pods, and foliage.

Bentley's work gained attention in the last few years of the nineteenth century after his work was first published in a magazine by Henry Crocker of Fairfax, Vermont. Crocker consequently ended up the largest private collection of Bentley's works. 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 fourteenth Edition of Encyclopedia Britannica.

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, after waking home six miles in a blizzard. Bentley was memorialized in the naming of a science center in his memory at Johnson State College in Johnson, Vermont. Shortly before his death, his book Snow Crystals was published by McGraw/Hill and is still in print today.