Studying snow crystals

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, January 16th. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: a teenager’s obsession leads to a new discovery.

WORLD Reporter Jenny Rough now has a story about the pioneer of what we know as snowflake photography.

SUE RICHARDSON: I say it often, he had the mind of a scientist and the soul of a poet.

JENNY ROUGH, REPORTER: Sue Richardson opens the door of the Old Red Mill located in Jericho, Vermont.

SOUND: [Unlocking, opening a creaking door]

The Mill was built in the 1800s, but it’s no longer a place to ground grain—not these days. The Mill now houses the work of Wilson Bentley, a man who broke new ground in the field of science and photography. Richardson has a personal connection to him.

RICHARDSON: I am Wilson Bentley’s great-grandniece.

It all began around the year 1880 when Bentley’s mother gave her 15-year-old son a microscope.

The Bentleys lived on a family farm. They milked cows and grew potatoes. So young Willie was in tune with weather and crop cycles, and he had a deep appreciation for nature.

RICHARDSON: He looked at everything from a blade of grass to a flower pedal to a bird’s feather and a piece of stone.

And then one day, he looked at a very, very tiny object. One that could vanish at any moment, leaving no trace.

RICHARDSON: He was absolutely captivated with just how beautiful and intricate and delicate this thing was.

A snowflake. Or more accurately, a snow crystal.

RICHARDSON: The little individual ones that you see are snow crystals. A snowflake is when you have two or more stuck together. So when you see those big snowflakes falling, those are snowflakes.

A snow crystal is born when a molecule of moisture and a spec of dust intersect in the atmosphere. As it falls to earth, it grows.

RICHARDSON: They grow just like the rock crystals we find in granite. Snow crystals grow six-sided. They’re symmetrical.

Thankfully, snowflake season is a farmer’s slow season. So each winter, Bentley did little else but analyze and contemplate snow. To study snow crystals, Bentley first needed to capture them.

RICHARDSON: And he got a piece of dark cloth from his mother. He would step out into the storm and catch the falling snow, then take a broom straw and touch it to the center of the crystal he wanted to sketch and use that to transfer it to the cold microscope slide.

To make snow stick to the cold microscope slide—

RICHARDSON: And he used a feather, a turkey feather.

He worked in an unheated woodshed.

RICHARDSON: So if it’s 9 degrees out there, it’s 9 degrees in the woodshed where he’s working. He wore those big, heavy mittens, so there’d be no heat transference from his hands to anything.

He attempted to draw what he saw on a sketchpad.

RICHARDSON: And then he would sit there and sketch, looking through the microscope, holding his breath, turn away, catch a breath, come back to it.

A pine needle. A starfish. A blooming flower. A piece of coral. A fragment of white lace. Those are just a few of the words Bentley recorded in his papers to describe the shape of snow crystals.

But the sketches didn’t capture their exquisite beauty.

Bentley had heard of a new art—something called photography—and he had seen a camera before.

RICHARDSON: The problem was this camera that he wanted cost $100. And for perspective, at that point in time, land was selling for about $3 an acre.

Cost wasn’t Bentley’s only hurdle. His father called his son’s hobby a boyish ridiculous whim. But then his mother inherited some money, and she gave Bentley a camera for his 17th birthday. He knew—

RICHARDSON: That if he could combine a camera with a microscope, he could then photograph these snow crystals and share this beautiful discovery with the world.

He did combine the two. And wound up with a clunky, wooden apparatus that had lenses, tubes, and string to maneuver discs three feet away.

RICHARDSON: So now he could stand behind the camera, and by turning those discs could focus.

Bentley kept meticulous notes. Each time he captured and photographed a snow crystal, he wrote down all the weather-related data.

RICHARDSON: Corresponding entries that documented the temperature, the humidity, the part of the storm it came from, the leading edge, the middle, or the back end, wind direction...

He noticed the colder the temperature, the more solid the crystals. As the temperature warmed, the snow crystals branched out to become more open and delicate.

Bentley took over 5,000 photographs of snow crystals. He never found two alike, and the phrase no two snowflakes are alike stems from his discoveries. Experts today agree that even though some crystals might appear to be identical to the eye, there are differences at the molecular level.

RICHARDSON: Because there’s so many variables in how these crystals form in the atmosphere. That the likelihood of finding two alike is infinitesimal.

Bentley kept at his passion until he died at age 66. Ultimately, snow led to his demise. After a trip to Burlington, Bentley walked home in a snowstorm.

RICHARDSON: So off he goes in a blizzard over the mountain, seven miles. And by the time he got home, of course, he was soaked to the hide. He was chilled through. He took sick. It turned into pneumonia. He died on the 23rd of December.

Bentley never patented his microscope-camera invention. He never claimed creative rights over his photographs. In fact, when people contacted him to purchase negatives, he charged them five cents a piece, the cost to make one. The year he died in 1931, he was still only charging five cents a piece.

RICHARDSON: But it was never about the money for him. It was about sharing God’s beautiful gift with the world.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jenny Rough in Jericho, Vermont.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.