No two snowflakes are alike, right? This is the fellow who proved it – and not as long ago as you might think either.
Wilson A Bentley (1865-1931) was “the Snowflake Man”, a Vermont farmer who fastened a microscope to a bellows camera and in 1885, after years of trial and error, became the first person to photograph a single snow crystal.

His pioneering work in photomicrography earned him international attention, and still does. The Jericho Historical Society, established in 1972, and its dedicated website SnowflakeBentley.com keep his legacy alive.

They also maintain an exhibit and sell a DVD on his life and work, “Snowflakes in Motion”, out of this Old Red Mill. This was part of the 1885-vintage Chittenden Mills and is now a national historic site.

Working out of the family homestead, Bentley took more than 5,000 snowflake portraits and, that’s right, never found any two alike.

The images made the rounds of universities throughout the world and he published many articles for magazines and journals, including Scientific American and National Geographic. His 1931 book “Snow Crystals” contains more than 2,400 microphotos.

Wilson Alwyn Bentley was born on the east side of Jericho on February 9, 1856. He was home-schooled by his mother until he was 14, and she happened to have a microscope. It absorbed him, and he was fascinated by snowflakes from an early age, making hundreds of sketches. As soon as he could, talked his dubious father into buying a camera.

“His painstaking work, carried out entirely by himself on his small Jericho farm,” Duncan Blanchard wrote in the 1970 biography “The Snowflake Man”, “was so thorough and gave such new insights into the formation of precipitation that he deserves the title of America’s First Cloud Physicist.”

During a snowstorm on January 15, 1885, he managed to capture the world’s first photomicrograph of an ice crystal. For the next 13 years he worked quietly and kept detailed meteorological records, until George Perkins of the University of Vermont heard about his efforts and got him to write an article for Appleton’s Popular Scientific Monthly: “Was ever life history written in more dainty hieroglyphics!” he wrote poetically, but there was much astute scientific theory and discovery to follow. Fully 30 years before his time, he postulated that snowflakes are sculpted by the different temperatures they encounter during their descent.

Scientists have got nosier since Wilson’s time. This is what a snow crystal looks like reallyclose. Not nearly as purty, but just as intriguing.

What did Wilson Bentley do in summer (besides farming)? He studied rain. From 1898 through 1904, he made 344 measurements of the sizes of raindrops from 70 different storms, then published his ingenious theories about them. (Normally you measure a raindrop’s size by measuring its splash, apparently. Bentley’s drops fell in flour and dried – he compared the pellets with those created by droplets of a known size.)

By 1920 thousands of people had heard of the Snowflake Man, and his photomicrographs were in demand by jewellers, engravers and the textile industry.

He never married, but he did like girls. To his other pastimes – playing the clarinet, geology, studying the aurora, helping the Fresh Air Fund bring city kids out to the countryside – he kept a catalogue of smiles. He’d often approach strange girls on the street who smiled in a certain way. “When complimented and questioned if they knew why they smiled prettily, the lucky possessors answer was invariably ‘no’.”

Huh.

Bentley died of pneumonia on December 23, 1931, three weeks after his last foray into a blizzard to snap more snowflakes.

“Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated,” he wrote in 1925. “When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.”

Interestingly, the Bentley site makes much of the fact that he was largely ignored by science, and over at SnowCrystals.com is evidence of this, alongside some jazzy crystals like the one below. (Notice that it is not symmetrical, not a bit.)

The site doesn’t credit Bentley with being the first to realise that no two flakes are the same, but them again it doesn’t seem to credit anyone, not Johannes Kepler, nor René Descartes, nor Robert Hooke and not even Ukichiro Nakaya, whose “systematic” studies in the 1950s garner a lot more enthusiasm here. Old Will Bentley gets short shrift.

SnowCrystals.com is pretty hard-nosed about the physics of flakes, but it does make room for the “neat” stuff like making your own crystals as well as “ice spikes” (rather lame little spindles that sometimes appear in your ice-cube tray is you do this, this, this and this).

Seen here is one of their “designer” snowflakes, which they make in their California lab year-round. You can also read up on Snowflake Hot Spots (Michigan and North Dakota are apparently the standouts for serious collectors) before the site gets grumpy again when someone asks for an opinion on Masaru Emoto.

Id never heard of the guy either, but evidently that’s just as well, because Masaru Emoto’s work “is nothing more than the usual New Age nonsense – popular gibberish”. Emoto has published several books claiming ice crystals grow differently when water is first exposed to different thoughts and feelings.
“For example, he may start by playing assorted varieties of music – jazz, classical, rock’n'roll, etc – to different containers of water. The ‘treated’ water is then used to grow snow crystals under otherwise identical conditions … My best guess is that Mr Emoto grows hundreds of crystals and then selects different shapes to demonstrate whatever point he wishes to make.”

At least Bentley didn’t get a slamming like that.