We haven't had much snow so far this season. Not that I'm complaining, but in truth I don't mind a little a bit of snow.
I love being out during a snowstorm. Not a raging blizzard, mind you, where the wind is howling and little snowflake pellets are pinging your face. But a kinder, gentler snowstorm. The ones that make you feel as if you're walking around in a snow globe.
Even better, I love being inside during a snowstorm, looking out, drinking my cup of tea, all comfy and cozy.
And I love that snow storms are made up of snowflakes.
Seriously, there are few things in nature that are more beautiful than snowflakes.
I can still remember the thrill of catching a snowflake on a wool mitten and admiring its intricacy and beauty for that fleeting moment before it disappeared.
And one of the most wonderful things in the wonderful world of science is that fact that no two snowflakes are alike.
I'll confess to a lack of curiosity about how someone figured this out. If I had to venture a guess, I'd have said some nutty professor somewhere.
Turns out it was a farmer from Vermont, who first snapped a photo of a snowflake - or performed the late nineteenth century equivalent of snapping a photo - in 1885, when he was twenty.
[Wilson Alwyn] Bentley is credited as the first person to ever photograph snow crystals — commonly called snowflakes — up close. His painstaking process and hobby was perfected over decades using a homemade contraption involving a microscope mounted to a bellows camera. His passion for photographing snow earned him the nicknames “Snowflake” and “Snowflake Man,” the latter etched on his grave when he died in 1931.
And his life’s work formed the basis for the old adage “no two snowflakes are alike.”
“I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others,” Bentley said in 1925. “Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated." (Source: Boston Globe)
His discovery was aided by his mother. She'd been a school teacher who brought a small microscope to her marriage, and later gave it to her intellectually curious son Wilson.
Fascinated by what he saw under his microscope, young Wilson tried to draw snowflakes. Alas, the snowflakes melted too quickly to capture the detail.
But a camera could.
Trouble was, there wasn't a lot of spare cash around a remote Vermont farm in the late eighteen hundreds.
As luck would have it, the Bentley family came into an inheritance and bought a camera with it. Jerry rigging the camera to a new microscope, and capturing the snowflakes on a chilled glass plate, did the trick. Talk about Yankee ingenuity.
After that first successful photograph:
He would go on to photograph well over 5000 snow crystals (never finding two the same), and his documentation of this work advanced the study of meteorology in his time. His photomicrographs were acquired by institutes of higher learning all over the world and his writings on these subjects were published in many journals and magazines including Scientific American, National Geographic and The National Weather Service Research Journal. (Source: SnowflakeBentley.com)
Here's what Wilson Alwyn Bentley had to say about his early days as a stay-at-home explorer:
When the other boys of my age were playing with popguns and sling-shots, I was absorbed in studying things under this microscope: drops of water, tiny fragments of stone, a feather dropped from a bird's wing, a delicately veined petal from some flower.
But always, from the very beginning, it was snowflakes that fascinated me most. The farm folks, up in this north country, dread the winter; but I was supremely happy, from the day of the first snowfall-which usually came in November-until the last one, which sometimes came as late as May.
Talk about making the most of a brutal Northern New England winter.
I just love this story. Almost as much as I love snowflakes.
But wait, there's more.
Bentley died of pneumonia in 1931 - pneumonia caught while he was out and about during a blizzard, photographing snowflakes.
If ever there were a pure Vermont story, this be it.
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