The ice and snow are mostly gone, but winter still lingers in patches around Jericho, Vermont—where a world-famous poet scientist first coined the phrase “No two snowflakes are alike.”
He was a humble farmer. Land costed $3 an acre in 1880 when the 15-year-old Wilson Bentley first dreamed of attaching a new big bellows camera to the microscope his mother had given him. His hopes were to photograph the snowflakes he was observing through magnification in fascination, which would spark a life-long passion and legacy.
The problem was the camera costed $100, a king’s ransom in those days, and no farmer in Vermont who had any practical sense would spend so wastefully, according to Mr. Bentley’s great-grandniece Sue Richardson.
“One hundred dollars represented 33 acres of prime farmland to his father, who was a farmer and was not inclined to spend that kind of money,” Ms. Richardson, 67, told The Epoch Times. A retired homecare worker, she now manages the Snowflake Bentley Exhibit at the Historic Old Red Mill.
“It was actually an inheritance from [his mother’s] parents that provided the money,” she said. “That inheritance came in 1881.”
The laboratory young Bentley had already set up for studying his microscopic curiosities would soon serve as a photographer’s studio. Not exactly a lab, it was a shack, and had no heat. But fortunately, young Bentley was used to weathering the harsh Vermont winters—which he often spent catching snowflakes on dark-colored fabric and then trying to sketch them on paper.
He would “take a straw from a broom and use it to touch the center of the snow crystal and transfer it to the microscope slide,” Ms. Richardson said, adding that he held his breath so that the delicate structures would not melt as he drew them.
“He sketched about 400 snow crystals,” she said. “At some point, he realized that what he was sketching was a poor representation of what he was seeing.”
When his bellows camera finally arrived, the infinitely detailed crystal images he would become famous for depicting were still a ways off, as the young Bentley had to figure out a process for his microphotography. But on January 15, 1885, after spending the whole winter taking pictures, and after finding a pinhole small enough not to overexpose his fragile apparatus, Mr. Bentley successfully took the world’s first snow crystal photograph.
Stories told to Ms. Richardson by her grandma speak of the young man wanting to fall to his knees to worship that big bellows for making his dream possible, after three long years of trial and error. Despite his being uneducated, he would also become a sought-after source of meteorological knowledge and, begrudgingly, a wellspring of intuitive wisdom for the scientific community, who had done their best to ignore him, until they couldn’t.
But above all, his simply sublime snowflake photos spoke volumes.
Almost magical to behold, they were something the world had never laid eyes on before. Soon, he was being sought out by big museums and publications. “He was being published in these scientific magazines, and National Geographic, and everything,” Ms. Richardson said. “Colleges and universities all over the world were writing to him, wanting to buy copies of his negatives for teaching purposes.”
His antiquated contraption somehow had revealed in fine detail the intricate patterns and designs of nature in winter with a clarity exceeding today’s technology, she told the newspaper.
“The photographs [today] are different, they’re more three-dimensional where his were more two-dimensional,” she said, calling Mr. Bentley a man “so far ahead of his time.”
“He sold them for 5 cents a piece, that’s what he charged, which was exactly what it cost him to make a duplicate,” she said. “He never raised his price, because it was never about money. For him, it was about sharing this beautiful gift with the world.”
Like many forerunners and geniuses, Mr. Bentley was seen as an outsider by some, especially from people in his hometown, who thought he was crazy. Snow was worthless to a farmer in Jericho; it would neither add to your crop yield nor make your cows produce more milk, his great-grandniece said.
But his eventual 5,381 snowflake portraits comprising his lifework would be celebrated by many others. Tiffany’s bought a set from him for their jewelry designs. Harper’s women’s magazine also featured his work. Thanks to the Boston Globe, he famously became the “Snowflake Man.” In 2023, the Natural History Museum of London digitized 80 pieces of his work, immortalizing his crystal microphotography.
Leaving a legacy in science, Mr. Bentley would be encouraged by the University of Vermont’s professor George Perkins, who prodded him into writing his first scientific article; he would give lectures nationwide. His theories of how snowflakes formed in the atmosphere were influential, and he invented a way to measure the size of a raindrop using a pan and flour that is still used today.
“In his scientific writings, he tended to wax poetic, it was just part of who he was,” Ms. Richardson said. “I tell people often that Wilson Bentley had the mind of a scientist and the soul of a poet.”
The great irony in how he lived to fulfill his life’s goal lies in how he died. His desperation to rush home on foot to catch a snowstorm in hopes of taking more photos led him to cross a mountain haphazardly, wearing inadequate clothing and footwear. Although Mr. Bentley made it home safe, the weather took a toll. He died of pneumonia on Dec. 23, 1931. He was 66.
“He was a kind and gentle man, a humble farmer who wanted nothing more than to share this beautiful discovery with the world,” his great-grandniece said, adding that she has the “best retirement job,” promoting her hometown and family history. “The fact that he’s still doing it 92 years after his death is just extraordinary.”
