nature & planetThe Public Domain Review1885 · Jericho, Vermont, USA
A self-taught Vermont farmer photographed some 5,000 snowflakes and showed that no two look alike
Wilson Bentley, a farmer who spent his life in Jericho, Vermont, became the first person to photograph a snowflake in 1885, when he was twenty. He combined a bellows camera with a microscope and used a cold velvet tray, a broom splint and a turkey feather to move crystals without melting them. Over the following decades until his death in 1931, he captured more than 5,000 snow crystals, often scraping his negatives to give them dark backgrounds. He also studied raindrops by catching them in flour and measuring the dough pellets they left, which later helped cloud physicists in the 1940s. Bentley observed that crystal shape depended on the temperature at which it formed, a hypothesis confirmed nearly three decades later by Ukichiro Nakaya in Japan. He became known as the Snowflake Man and his book Snow Crystals was published in 1931.
Bentley's images gave the public an early look at the structure of ice and helped establish the basic science of snow formation. His work also anticipated later research in cloud physics.
Wilson Bentley's book Snow Crystals was published by McGraw-Hill in 1931 and later reissued by Dover.
background
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 such that their images could be captured before they either melted or sublimated, and elaborated the theory that no two snowflakes are identical.
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.
From Wikipedia: Wilson Bentley (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗see
key facts
- Born
- 9 February 1865
- Died
- 23 December 1931
- Known as
- farmer, photographer
Facts: Wikidata (CC0)
Image: The Public Domain Review
