For most rural Vermont farmers in the 19th century, winter blizzards were something they feared and endured. But for Wilson Bentley, snow is a source of intense fascination, and the 19-year-old took the world’s first photomicrographs of snowflakes, describing them as “little wonders of beauty”. A stunning album of his 355 originals by the man who became known as Snowflake His Bentley was purchased by the Natural History Museum in London in 1899 .”They are so incredibly beautiful,” said Andrea Hart, director of the museum’s special library collections. You will understand what happened.”
Bentley was born into a remote farming family in Vermont, in the northeastern United States. His scientific interest in snow began at the age of 15 when his mother, a teacher, gave him a microscope. At first, he tried to draw snowflake patterns, but he was too complicated to draw them before they melted.
His father later gave him a bellows camera to connect to a microscope, and after many experiments, he photographed his first snowflake on January 15, 1885.The winter months would have been tough for the farming community,” Hart said. It will upset you.”
Bentley was also fascinated by the beauty of the images, and his magazine articles reveal his poetic twists. “Each crystal was a masterpiece of design, and the design was never duplicated. When the snowflake melted, the design was lost forever,” he wrote in his 1925 report. increase. Throughout his life, Bentley was fascinated by snow, ice, and other natural water formations. He spent his 47th consecutive winter and with the same camera, he took 5,381 pictures of snowflakes. He was the first American to record the size of raindrops, and he was one of the first cloud physicists. He died of pneumonia on December 23, 1931, at the age of 66, after walking home in a snowstorm.
