A Vermont farmer who caught 5,381 snowflakes on black velvet, and never found two alike.
On January 15, 1885, during a snowstorm in Jericho, Vermont, a nineteen-year-old farm boy caught a single snow crystal on a blackened board and photographed it before it could vanish. No one had ever done it before. Wilson Bentley had rigged a bellows camera to a compound microscope, and failed through much of the winter until it worked. His father thought it a waste of time.
He kept at it for forty-six more winters. By the end he had made 5,381 photomicrographs of snow, measured raindrops in seventy storms, and taught the world the idea it still repeats every December: no two snowflakes are alike. He spent far more on the work than it ever paid him. His great book came out in November 1931; he died that Christmas week.
One farm, sixty-six winters
The lifeline
1865
Born February 9 on the family farm in Jericho, Vermont
1880
At 15, his mother, a former teacher, gives him her small microscope
1885
January 15: the first photograph of a single snow crystal
1898
First article, with UVM's George Perkins; begins measuring raindrops
1924
Receives the American Meteorological Society's first research grant
1931
Snow Crystals published in November; dies of pneumonia December 23
By the numbers
The measure of him
5,381
Photomicrographs of snow crystals, as his log counted them in his final year
46
Years from his first snowflake photograph to his book
344
Raindrops measured from 70 storms, 1898–1904, using pans of flour
$15k
His own estimate of what the work cost him. It brought in under $4,000 (1926)
What he caught before it melted
The work
1885
The first photomicrograph of a snow crystal. He caught each flake on a black board and moved it quickly to a glass slide, working in the cold before it could melt or sublimate.
1898
"A Study of Snow Crystals," with Professor George H. Perkins, in Appleton's Popular Science Monthly. It argued that no two crystals are alike.
1898–1904
Raindrops. He let drops fall into trays of flour and measured the pellets they left: 344 measurements from 70 storms. It was early work in the physics of clouds, published in the Monthly Weather Review in 1904.
1898–1931
More than 100 articles in newspapers and magazines, from Scientific American to National Geographic, and 10 technical papers for the Monthly Weather Review.
1931
Snow Crystals, with W. J. Humphreys of the U.S. Weather Bureau. Nearly 2,500 of his photographs, chosen from about 4,500 he sorted. It is still in print.
A crank, then a classic
Recognition
In his lifetime
His father opposed the photography as a waste of farm time
Sold his lantern slides to schools and colleges at little or no profit
Never held a university post; he worked alone on the family farm
Recognised by meteorologists only late, with a 1924 grant for "40 years of extremely patient work"
Today
"No two snowflakes are alike" has become common knowledge
His glass plates are held by the Buffalo Museum of Science; the Jericho Historical Society keeps the broadest collection
Snowflake Bentley, a picture book about his life, won the 1999 Caldecott Medal
Physicist Kenneth Libbrecht: he did it "so well that hardly anybody bothered to photograph snowflakes for almost 100 years"
Where the snow came to him
Jericho, Vermont
He never needed to travel. Snow came to Jericho every winter, and he waited for it on the farm where he was born. His mother taught him at home, and he lived in that farmhouse all his life. In his last years he shared it with his brother's family. As the story is still told in Jericho, he walked home through a snowstorm that December, and the pneumonia that killed him followed.
1
Farmhouse he lived in all his life. It is now on the National Register of Historic Places
200+
Snow crystals photographed in the single winter of 1902
Dec 7
1931: the last entry in his weather log
"Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty… Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost."
— Wilson A. Bentley, 1925
