![]() ![]() 1910 - Source.īentley also devised his own processing methods. Once focused, the sensitized glass plate - the “film” - was exposed and stored for further processing, development and printing. The back-lit image was focused using a system of strings and pulleys he devised to accommodate his mittened hands. The slide was then carried into his photographic shed and placed under the microscope. Taking care not to melt the crystal with his breath, 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. What he found worked best was to capture the crystals on a cool velvet-covered tray. In addition to the development of the hardware, Bentley also had to devise a protocol to capture a snow crystal and transport it with minimal damage to the camera’s field of vision. When his father purchased a camera for his son, Wilson combined it with his microscope, and went on to make his first successful photomicrograph of a snow crystal on January 15, 1885. So that he could share his discoveries, he began by sketching what he saw, accumulating several hundred sketches by his seventeenth birthday. His initial investigations proved both fascinating and frustrating as he tried to observe the short-lived flakes. A lover of winter, he made plans to use his microscope to view snowflakes. It started with a microscope his mother gave him at age fifteen which opened the world of the small to young Wilson. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost.” Our belief that “no two snowflakes are alike” stems from a line in a 1925 report in which he remarked: “Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated. Despite the fact that he rarely left Jericho, thousands of Americans knew him as The Snowflake Man or simply Snowflake Bentley. Throughout the following winters, until his death in 1931, Bentley would go on to capture over 5000 snowflakes, or more correctly, snow crystals, on film. 1910 - Source In 1885, at the age of twenty, Wilson Alwyn Bentley, a farmer who would live all his life in the small town of Jericho in Vermont, gave the world its first ever photograph of a snowflake. Photograph of a snowflake, by Wilson Bentley, ca. If you also wish to reuse it, please read this. It was originally published as “The Snowflake Man of Vermont” in The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Heidorn takes a look at the life and work of Wilson Bentley, a self-educated farmer from a small American town who, by combining a bellows camera with a microscope, managed to photograph the dizzyingly intricate and diverse structures of the snow crystal. ![]()
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