Wilson A. Bentley, the Snowflake Man

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy D. Wilson. And Tracy. I bet you were taught as a kid in science class, probably pretty early on. That's all. Snowflakes are unique and there are no two exactly the same. Yeah. I think it was so early that science was not a separate class, right, It was science together like kindergarten. And then we would like fold the paper into little shapes and cut it out and then unfolded and it would be our own unique snowflake. There you go. Uh. Today, we're going to talk about the origin of that by sharing the story of Wilson Bentley, who was a farmer meteorologist who became known to many during his lifetime as the snowflake Man. I'm glad you picked this because I fund it interesting and and I got to look at pictures of snowflakes. So Bentley was born Wilson Alwyn Bentley on February nine, eight sixty five, and Jericho, Vermont. Living in the farmhouse where the Bentley's lived. There were Wilson and his brother Charles. Their parents, Edwyn and Fanny Bentley, and their grandparents on Edwin's side, Shelley and Abigail Bentley. Shelley and Abigail had owned the property and then they had turned it over to Edwyn when he was ready to start a family, on the condition that he kept housing and caring for his parents. So, while Wilson was still a boy, his grandparents moved to another house down the road, and two have Edwin's relatives, Mary and Melissa Blood, moved in. Wilson's brother Charles, married Mary Blood when she was still just a child of twelve herself. Yeah, we should also point out that there is there are question marks about Mary and Melissa and their relationship to the family because they're often kind of casually referred to as cousins or distant relatives. But it also seems like they may have been just kind of like close friends of the family who had fallen on hard times and needed a place to live, and so they kind of got adopted into the family unofficially um and got called cousins, but they were not. They may not have been blood relatives at all. But the area where the Bentley's lived was on the east side of Jericho. It was close to Bolton Mountain and it was serviced by a one room schoolhouse. But Wilson Bentley did not go to school as a child, do in some part to it just being difficult to actually get to the school building for a lot of the time during the year because of inclement weather where they lived, but that does not mean he went without an education thanks to his mother, who was an educator. According to Bentley's own account, quote, I never went to school until I was fourteen years old. My mother taught me at home. She had been a school teacher before she married my father, and she instilled in me her love of knowledge and of the finer things of life. She had books, including a set of encyclopedia. I read them all. He also learned to play piano, clarinet, coronet, and violin from his mother, and he played music his whole life and really loved it. Bentley's mother is also the person who gave Wilson his first microscope, essentially setting the stage for his life's work. That microscope was old. It was one that had been part of her science lessons when she was still teaching, and she gave it to her son, who was ever more curious about nature, and like a lot of kids who get to play with microscopes, he just started putting everything he could find under its lens, from flower pedals to feathers to water. But even at that early age fifteen by Bentley's recollection, what he really wanted to look at was snowflakes. He would later write quote, when other boys of my age were playing with pop guns and slingshots, I was orbed in studying things under the microscope. Drops of water, tiny fragments of stone, a feather dropped from a bird's wing, a delicately veined petal of some flower. But always from the beginning, it was the 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. As a team, he started taking the microscope to the outermost room of the family farmhouse, which stayed very cold, so he could look at ice crystals there. So we're going to do a quick word here on the term snowflake versus snow crystal or ice crystal. They all often get used interchangeably, but the six sided shapes that we all kind of vernacularly called snowflakes are really snow crystals, and many snow crystals can make up a snowflake. They clump together as they fall and then some times break back apart. But snowflake can also still be used to describe a single snow or ice crystal, and this is something Bentley came to realize as he studied frozen precipitation and snow crystals, of course, to be clear, are not frozen rain, that is sleet. They are snow crystals formed when water vapor becomes ice without passing through a liquid water stage. Wilson observed all of this, but he didn't just observe. He took detailed notes, and he drew snow crystals. He knew that he was probably getting the details wrong, though, and that frustrated him. Ice crystals being what they are, they also melted before he could look at them again and revise his sketches to make them more accurate. He would try to hold his breath during his observations and his sketching so that he wouldn't melt the things he was trying to draw sometimes though he would exhale and have to end that whole study accidentally. I can't imatione one the tenacity that this requires him to the frustration in those moments when you just let your breath go because you can't hold your breath forever. Yeah, And then you know, anytime I need to not breathe for some reason, that's when I want to breathe so bad. For sure. It becomes like a panic inducer for me. Um Wilson's father was never especially enthused about his son's scientific pursuits. He was a farmer, and he expected that Wilson would follow suit. Even so, when Wilson learned about the possibility of a camera that might be able to take photographs through a microscope, he and his mother made the case to Edwin Bentley that they needed one, and he ultimately acquiesced to that request. And this was to be clear a big investment. According to Wilson Bentley's later in life writing quote, when I was seventeen years old, my mother persuaded my father to buy for me the camera and microscope, which I have developed into the apparatus I am still using. It cost even then one hundred dollars. You can imagine how my father hated to spend all that money on what seemed to him a boy's ridiculous whim. Something to note here is that while the elder Bentley okayed the acquisition of this equipment, Wilson was in no way absolved of any of his duties on the farm. He could pursue his snowflake studies, but he could not shark any other parts of his work, and this held true for the whole time he was doing this research and doing experiments with photography. But Wilson Mentley was still a teenager at this point. He had never taken a photograph in his life when he had this new camera, and his work with the microscope was largely self directed, with some pointers from his mother. If you have ever gotten really, really excited about a new technology or a hobby and bought a bunch of expensive equipment, only to realize you have no idea you what to do with it, you are kind of where Wilson Bentley was in the early eighteen eighties. I'm just gonna say I don't know what that's like at all. I was just thinking about how I have a little point and shoot camera that has all kinds of settings that I like. I thought I was going to learn how to use them all, and I've learned none of them. I just used the automatic one, which at this point is effectively the same as my phone. See this made me think of when I got my embroidery machine and then was like, I need a bunch of software to do custom designs. And then I was like, okay, now what Slowly you figure it out. Although he may have been initially overwhelmed and probably disheartened by a lot of disappointments early on, he kept at it. He worked through trial and error to figure out how the camera worked and how he could actually take photos of microscopic things. Because he approached it this way, though, he started to understand the camera and his microscope and the behavior of the ice crystals with incredible depth of expertise. He figured out a way that he could collect the snow crystals on a black board outside and then move inside carefully with the ones he had collected, and then he used a chicken feather, something that was very abundant on the farm, to very carefully move the snow crystal that he wanted to look at onto a plate and under the microscope. One of the problems was simply a matter of size, not of the snowflakes, but of the camera. The camera that Bentley had purchased was a Bellows camera. That's one of the ones that has like an accordion between the length part and the back part if you're having trouble visualizing it. He had to position the microscope at one end and then step around to the other side of it to see through the viewfinder. But if he was looking through the camera and needed to focus the microscope, he could not do both of that at the same time. The length of the Bellows was longer than the distance of his arm that he could reach. So to solve that problem, Bentley came up with a way to attach the fine focused mechanism of the microscope to a wheel and pulley that he could manipulate from the other end of the camera while still seeing the image. It's pretty ingenious. His first successful photo micrograph was made on January five during a snowstorm. Bentley, who was just shy of his twentieth birthday, was elated, and he later wrote of that moment quote the day that I developed the first negative made by this method and found it good. I felt almost like falling on my knees beside that apparatus and worshiping in it was the greatest moment of my life. The first picture of a snowflake had been made. It had taken Bentley four years to figure out exactly how to do it, so most people would probably want to scream about that kind of achievement from the rooftops. But Bentley was not like most people we'll talk about when he decided to share his photo micrograph work after a quick word from a sponsor. So, as we mentioned before the break, Wilson Bentley had taken the first photograph of a snowflake, but he did not immediately share his work, not even close. It was another thirteen years before anyone even heard about it. But during those thirteen years he was incredibly busy. He worked during that time to capture more images, more than four hundred, but he also started composing a data record of not just the ice crystals he had observed, but also meteorological data like storm severity and timing, trying to see if there was a pattern that would link the characteristics of the ice crystals he observed with the nature of the storm that had delivered them, and he was really doing this, it seemed just out of sheer curiosity and enthusiasm for it. He didn't think he was doing anything that was especially groundbreaking, and kind of presumed that anything he found had already been studied by scientists and scholars, and he certainly wasn't making any money at it. He just loved it. This level of devotion to something with no bigger plans for the pursuit may seem odd. It certainly did to people who knew Wilson. He was generally considered odd or eccentric by pretty much everyone. One story told by a fellow villager was that as a prank, a bunch of boys switched the wheels on Bentley's buggy so that the front wheels were the big ones and the back ones were small, instead of the normal way, which was the other way around. They were even more amazed when Bentley showed no reaction to this and just drove a buggy home and never mentioned it. Uh. It's not clear whether he didn't notice or just ignored it. Yeah, just an illustration of how he was a little bit different. But though people found him strange, he was also generally well liked because he was a very kind, quiet young man, easygoing, witty, and friendly, despite the fact that he was also a bit of an introvert. He loved to play piano for the kids in the community, and he played cornet in a brass band. And because Jericho was a very small community, everyone knew about his fascination with precipitation in Bentley's collection of snow crystal photographs, which totaled more than four hundred, was purchased by the Harvard Mineralogical Museum, and that same year a professor at the University of Vermont named George Perkins heard about Wilson Bentley in his obsession with ice crystals. He had seen the photographs and was amazed. But Bentley had never written about his work, at least never successfully. He had made one attempt, but that had fallen flat. Writing skills were just not the best, and he never tried again. But George Perkins took Wilson's notes and turned them into an article that was published in Appleton's Popular Science monthly, and the two men shared a byline on it. And that article ends with a paragraph that, well, it may have been helped along by Perkins is very much in the style of writing that Bentley's later papers would show really for the rest of his life. It is a very sweet and wonder laden commentary on snow crystals, which reads quote, there is no surer road to fairyland than that which leads to the observation of snow forms. To such a student, the winter storm is no longer a gloomy phenomenon to be dreaded. Even a blizzard becomes a source of keenest, enjoyment and satisfaction as it brings to him from the dark, surging ocean of clouds forms that thrill his e your soul with pleasure. This was the first of many articles, papers, and books that he went on to write. Once he realized he could share what he was doing, it was like he couldn't stop. And his photographs had been made into an exhibition at Harvard. Suddenly he had the attention of a lot of people. He wrote regularly for the monthly Weather Review and other publications, always intertwining his scientific observations with this poetic style of writing. The first years of the twentieth century were very productive for Bentley. In nineteen o one, he published an article titled twenty Years Study of Snow Crystals that established a lot of ideas about snow and ice that were way ahead of their time. One of the most significant aspects of its contents was Bentley's observation that in all of the snow crystals he had observed, he had never seen to that were alike. He also stated that in his observations, the western and northwestern areas of storms produced the most perfect crystals. He also explained how he had come to the conclusion that conditions aloft were more important and influential to the formation of snow crystals than conditions closer to the Earth. That same year, Bentley had an exhibition of his photographs at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Then just a month later, his work was featured in the quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society in England. So you may be wondering what does a person this obsessed with weather created ice crystals do when it is too warm for those to form. He studies precipitation in its liquid form. It turns out, at least that's what Bentley did, just as he had wondered what caused ice crystals to form in snow. He started investigating how rain actually formed in He started by trying to measure rain drops that He did this in a really inventive way. There were already some scientists measuring the splashes that raindrops left when they hit a piece of paper or some other surface, but Bentley started using flower. He spread the flower evenly across a tray and then passed that tray through the rain. As a rain drop hit this inch deep flower layer, it would form a tiny ball of simple dough. When those little drops of dough dried, he measured them to figure out the size the raindrop had been. He performed control experiments to compare by dropping measured amounts of water onto the flower himself, so that he had an existing data set to use. This is so ingenious. I like to go, oh, I can create a set and then I'll have that as my comparative measure. That just seems brilliant to me. Um And He measured hundreds of rain drops over the next seven years, culminating in an article in the Monthly Weather Review. The largest raindrops that he measured were roughly six millimeters. It's very roughly a quarter inch in diameter and He noted that, just as was the case with snowflakes and snow crystals, different types of storms created different types of rain. In particular, he observed that when lightning was overhead, there was a greater frequency of large rain drops. Even though he was doing a lot of really groundbreaking work, in terms of the reception from the scientific community, he got a lot of silence, and he probably would have liked any kind of feedback, even if it was critical. We don't know for sure why so few scientists even to acknowledge what he was doing. I mean, we've talked before about like the scientific establishment being really reluctant to people they perceived as amateurs. But at this point in history, most people were amateurs. So uh, people knew what he was doing, and it seemed kind of strange that there wasn't a lot of engagement from that quarter. It could have been a matter of his outsider status, Like I just said, nobody knew who this farmer from Vermont was, or how or why he had started studying meteorology, you with no formal schooling. Biographer Duncan Blanchard theorized that it could also have been the way that Bentley wrote about his work was not always really scientific in its tone. It really retained the wonder and the delight that Bentley felt for the natural world, and that may have led to it not being taken very seriously. But because of that, he was really forging ahead in an understanding of his subjects with no collaborators. He was breaking this new ground by himself, even though nobody else is really watching. And here are a couple more examples to illustrate what we're talking about when we say that Bentley wrote about his work in ways that were decidedly unlike the scientific community. In an article that he wrote for Technical World in nineteen, it opens with the lines quote, what magic is there in the rule of six that compels the snowflake to conform so rigidly to its laws? Here is a gem bestrewn realm of nature, possessing the charm of mystery of the unknown, sure richly to reward the investigator. It's very sweet, not super scientific sounding. Uh. And he ended that same article, which was titled snow Beauties, by writing quote, Indeed, it seems likely that these wonderful bits of pure beauty from the skies will soon come into their own and receive the full appreciation and study to which their exquisite loveliness and great scientific interest entitled them. Even A more technical article that Bentley penned in two to explain his photographic process gets a bit flowery quote. Every snowflake has an infinite beauty, which is enhanced by knowledge that the investigator will, in all probability never find another exactly like it. Consequently, photographing these transient forms of nature gives to the worker something of the spirit of a discoverer. Besides combining her greatest skill and artistry in the production of snowflakes, nature generously fashions the most beautiful specimens on a very thin plane, so that they are specially adapted for photo micrographical study. In just a minute, we are going to delve into something we haven't really touched how much yet, and that is Wilson Bentley's personal life. But first we will pause for a sponsor break. As Wilson Bentley was doing all of this research and writing, he was still also working the family farm. His father died in seven and at that point his mother was largely immobile and needed a great deal of care, and that care just became part of Wilson's responsibilities. He cooked for her and took care of her until her death in nineteen o six. His brother Charles, after a brief foray into growing oranges in Florida that ended in disaster with a freeze, had also returned to Vermont and helped run the family farm after that point, and the farmhouse had basically been split into two years earlier, when an addition had been made after Charles and Mary got married and after their parents were gone. Wilson lived on one side and his brother, his sister in law, and their eight children lived on the other. While an entire space to one person seems like it would be the less chaotic household, Bentley was apparently kind of a mess, so he tended to have piles of stuff everywhere, and while it looked baffling to his family, he generally has said to have known how to find things when he wanted them. As he matured, Bentley was a little disappointed that the people he lived alongside really never came around thinking that his work was anything more than a silly fixation. It appears from his writing that he had always really hoped that the people of Jericho, Vermont would see and understand that his efforts had real merit quote years ago. I thought they might feel different if they understood what I was doing. I thought they might be glad to understand. So I announced that I would give a talk in the village and show lantern slides of my pictures. They're beautiful, you know, marvelously beautiful on the screen. And when the night came for my lecture, just six people were there to hear me. It was free bind you, and it was a fine, pleasant evening too, but they weren't interested. Bentley stopped writing for scientific publications in nineteen fifteen, after a very lengthy article for monthly Weather Review had been rejected. He continued to take snow crystal photos, though, including photographing three thirty eight snow crystals over the course of nineteen snowstorms in the year nineteen nineteen. But then in the fall of nineteen twenty, Bentley had an explosion of press coverage and got the nickname the Snowflake Man. This started with an article in the New York Tribune that covered his lifelong career and examining and documenting snow crystals. Another right up, this one in the Boston Herald fall shortly after that, then another and Leslie's Weekly, and then one in the Boston Globe. The world seemed to be remembering Bentley after having forgotten him for a few years, and this time he was clearly in the spotlight. He sort of turned into an overnight sensation, but this was all based on work that he'd been doing for thirty five years at this point. Yeah, it reminds me of that thing where like anybody, like a writer, will suddenly have a hit book and people be like, what's it like to be an overnight sensation, and they're like, I don't know, but it's the same thing he was. To him, it was always just work, work, work. He also started to become kind of more of a science communicator for the masses. He started writing for non scientists and people with curious minds who just wanted to understand the natural world. He was essentially writing for people just like himself, and his work continued to grow in popularity as a consequence, and soon he had articles in the New York Times, National Geographic, and Popular Mechanics. Eventually this work turned into a lecture tour. All the folks of Jericho, Vermont may not have wanted to see Bentley's slides and hear him talk about snowflakes and rain drops. It turned out that a lot of other people did. He started selling his slides to schools, although he was not doing this for the money by any means. He never really made a lot of money off of it. And even though he was not as focused on scientific writings any longer, Bentley was still following his curiosity where it led him. In the natural world. He continued to track weather patterns, but he also developed a lot of other interests. He started collecting rocks for geological analysis, and he took photos of other things that were not snow crystals, including people and flora. And he also started doing something that sounds really odd and in today's world would undoubtedly be branded as creepy. He started cataloging smiles, particularly girls smiles. So he would talk to girls that he met on the street if he thought they had what he called a quote charming smile. And he seemed fascinated by the same thing in smiles that he was fascinated about snowflakes. No two are alike. So this is where we get to the squirrely part. That smile thing is odd, but There were also people who thought his affinity for the company of kids rather than adults was also odd. We mentioned that he loved to play music for kids, but he also did things like build them tree forts and take them fishing. Sometimes he would take some of them to Burlington to go to the movies, particularly girls. This definitely got some tongues wagging about whether this was appropriate or not. Biographer duncan Ce Blanchard interviewed some of the kids many years later as adults, and they defended Bentley as being excited to teach kids and to spend time with them because they had the same enthusiasm for things like nature and discovery that he did. He had enjoyed the nieces and nephews that lived on his brother's side of the farmhouse, and as they grew up, he seemed to take on a sort of uncle role to other kids in Jericho. Yeah, that's one of those things that comes up and nobody really has any Like there was gossip, and there were people that were like, no, that's baseless, but we really have no idea if there was anything weird. But throughout the years he gained more recognition and he was always really ceaselessly generous with anyone who wanted copies of his slides. In one exchange, in a woman named Charlotte Bean sent him three dollars in a letter asking for photos, and he sent sixty of them along with a letter back in which he told her, quote, it was generous of you to tell me how much you enjoy the snow, etcetera. Photos for it gives me pleasure to learn so many are enjoying them. As the photos gained a wider audience and wider recognition for their beauty, he also got to see that they directly inspired other creators and his own words, he saw them used quote as models for designs in public schools and in schools of art. They are used for designnes, for interior decorators, for wallpaper, for silk doylies, china, any number of things. Even though he had not initially been recognized for his work, at least from the science side of things, that started to shift as he traveled and shared his thoughts on meteorology and gained a greater following. Then came a not insignificant gesture in recognition of those years of work, and that happened in nineteen twenty four. That year, he received a grant from the American Meteorological Society, the first research grant that organization ever issued. In nineteen thirty, an effort began to preserve Bentley's work with snowflakes in a book. A physicist named Dr William J. Humphreys, who worked for the U. S. Weather Bureau, initiated the project after having received requests for such a book over the years from people who had become familiar with the work of the snowflake Man, Humphreys started a fund raising endeavor to get the financial needs for the publication squared away, and once the money was secured, which it was pretty quickly, there was one UH donor who pretty much covered the majority of it. It was then on Bentley to actually put the book together, and he went through his years of snow and ice crystal research and all of his many slides of snow crystals, dew, and frost, and he wrote about the ways he had classified such things and what sorts of weather phenomena could be linked to various kinds. He finished this project in mid nineteen thirty one. In the book, titled Simply Snow Crystals, was published in November of that year, W. J. Humphries wrote the preface. After receiving his author copies, Bentley wrote to Humphries quote, I received three copies of our book Snow Crystals the day after Thanksgiving, and I am delighted with it. The text seems to me perfect and the half tones are superb. The second week of December one, just a couple of weeks after holding his book in his hand for the first time, Wilson Bentley was too sick to get out of bed. He waved off the concern of his family, saying that he would be fine, but his condition quickly got worse. Another week passed, but then Bentley's nephew called a doctor. At that point it was too late. He had pneumonia. Wilson Bentley died two days before Christmas nineteen thirty one, at the age of sixty six. According to coverage of his funeral in the St. Albans, Vermont Daily Messenger, quote, Mount Mansfield and its foothills, where Mr Bentley had taken literally thousands of photographs of snowflakes, were blanketed in snow. The sun shone brightly from a perfectly clear sky. It was estimated that seventy five people attended Bentley's funeral service. One right up in the local press read quote, Wilson Bentley was a greater man than many, a millionaire who lives in luxury of which the snowflake man never dreamed. Bentley took more than five thousands snowflake photos in his life, and they're beautiful. He used the same Bellows camera from the eighteen eighties right up until the end of his life. Five hundred of those photos or in the Smithsonian collection. Bentley donated them to ensure their safety. Most of his slides are cared for by the Jericho Historical Society. There are a few sets that are in other museum collections as well. And in twenty six of Bentley's images went up for sale at the American Antique Show. Ten of them were snowflake photographs. Remember he didn't only take photos of snowflakes, and those snowflake photos were priced at nearly five thousand dollars each. This would have undoubtedly been quite a surprise to Bentley, who once noted in his life that he had made about four thousand dollars in total for all of his snowflake work, and that he had spent about fifteen thousand doing it. You can also still buy Bentley's book Snow Crystals. You can and it's beautiful. Do you have some listener mail to take us out? I did. This is from our listener Margaret, who writes High Holly and Tracy. I just finished your Saturday classic about Walter Potter, and I loved the Field Museum shout out. I live in the suburbs of Chicago, and it's one of my favorite places to visit. I have always thought the placement of the Tsavo lions was interesting. They're basically under a staircase, fully visible, but sort of out of the way, like even the other exhibits are afraid of them. I went to College Downtown and one of the extra credit assignments I got in an anthropology class involved going to the field and taking pictures with a bunch of specific artifacts. However, the ta who selected the artifacts was going off an old visit or something, because, despite the multitude of animals, he picked a bird that was nowhere to be found. One of the artifacts we did find is the bust of an Egyptian queen who looks exactly like Michael Jackson. Uh and Margaret attached to picture so we could see that's accurate. I haven't been there since the pandemic, she writes, but I'm eager to go back to see the space they've made for Sue, famous for being the most complete t Rex skeleton ever found, she graced the main hall for years, but was recently replaced by a replica of a much larger dinosaur. Sue moved upstairs or the other dinosaurs, but was still given her own special area. I hope you have a nice holiday season. Thank you for helping keep me saying. I work retail, but in a mostly office capacity, so I turn on podcast when i'm going to be in here a while, and yours is the first one I check for new episodes. Margaret, thank you so much for this. I always love hearing about people's love for the field because it's one of my favorite museums. I was a little bummed. I went to Chicago in that magical sort of I feel like there was a part of the calendar in parentheses where it seemed like things were getting much better for a minute. And I went there to see my best friend and we did not make it to the field that trip, and I was like, Oh, I'll come back in a couple of months and I can not been back so um, but I cannot wait to go back because I desperately love that museum. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and if you would like to subscribe, you can do that on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M