{"id":152591,"date":"2020-03-09T12:00:47","date_gmt":"2020-03-09T12:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=152591"},"modified":"2020-01-28T06:54:56","modified_gmt":"2020-01-28T06:54:56","slug":"the-haunting-beauty-of-snowflakes-wilson-bentleys-pioneering-19th-century-photomicroscopy-of-snow-crystals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/03\/the-haunting-beauty-of-snowflakes-wilson-bentleys-pioneering-19th-century-photomicroscopy-of-snow-crystals\/","title":{"rendered":"The Haunting Beauty of Snowflakes: Wilson Bentley\u2019s Pioneering 19th-Century Photomicroscopy of Snow Crystals"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"The<\/a>Hardly any scientific finding has permeated popular culture more profoundly, transmuted its truth into a more pervasive clich\u00e9, or inspired more uninspired college application essays than the fact that no two snowflakes are alike. But for the vast majority of human history, the uniqueness of snowflakes was far from an established fact.<\/p>\n

In the early seventeenth century, while revolutionizing science with the celestial mechanics of the macro scale that would land his mother in a witchcraft trial<\/a>, Johannes Kepler turned his inquisitive imagination to the micro scale with a rather unusual Christmas present he made for a friend \u2014 a booklet titled The Six-Cornered Snowflake<\/em>, exploring in a playful and poetic way the science of why snowflakes have six sides. When one landed on his sleeve in the bitter Prague winter, Kepler found himself wondering why snowflakes \u201calways come down with six corners and with six radii tufted like feathers\u201d \u2014 and not, say, with five or seven. Centuries before the advent of crystallography, the visionary astronomer became the first to invite science into this ancient dwelling place of beauty and to ask, essentially, why snowflakes are the way they are. But it would be another two centuries before this intersection of science and splendor enraptures the popular imagination with the nexus of truth and beauty in the form of ice crystals \u2014 a task that would fall on a teenage farm-boy in Vermont.<\/p>\n

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Wilson Bentley<\/strong> (February 9, 1865\u2013December 23, 1931) was fifteen when his mother, aware of her son\u2019s sensitive curiosity and artistic bent, strained the family\u2019s means to give him a microscope for his birthday. Over the next four years, while Walt Whitman was exulting a state over that \u201ca leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,\u201d<\/a> Wilson placed every curio he could find under his microscope: blades of grass, pebbles, insects. The day he managed to place a snowflake on the glass plate and to savor its microscopic perfection before it melted, he was besotted. Snowflakes became his life. \u201cMiracles of beauty,\u201d he called them. He began sketching what he saw through his microscope, but felt that his drawings failed to capture the full miraculousness before it vanished into liquid erasure. Although his father was already irate with the boy\u2019s artistic deviation from farm labor, \u201cfussing with snowflakes\u201d rather than pulling potatoes, Wilson somehow persuaded him to invest in a camera.<\/p>\n

Weeks before his twentieth birthday, he mounted his new 1.5-inch microscope eyepiece to the lens of his enormous view camera with its accordion-like body fully extended. On January 15, 1880, Wilson Bentley took his first photograph of a snowflake. Mesmerized by the beauty of the result, he transported his equipment to the unheated wooden shed behind the farmhouse and began recording his work in two separate sets of notebooks \u2014 one filled with sketches and dedicated to refining his artistic photomicroscopy; the other filled with weather data, carefully monitoring the conditions under which various snowflakes were captured.<\/p>\n

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For forty-six winters to come, this slender quiet boy, enchanted by the wonders of nature and attentive to its minutest manifestations, would hold his breath over the microscope-camera station and take more than 5,000 photographs of snow crystals \u2014 each a vanishing masterpiece with the delicacy of a flower and the mathematical precision of a honeycomb, a ghost of perfection melting onto the glass plate within seconds, a sublime metaphor for the ecstasy and impermanence of beauty, of life itself. A generation after the invention of photography recalibrated our relationship to impermanence<\/a>, Wilson Bentley devoted his life to popularizing the uniqueness of snowflakes and helping others appreciate the ephemeral \u201cmasterpiece of design\u201d that each snowflake is, its singular and fleeting existence never to be replicated, its beauty gone \u201cwithout leaving any record behind.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Wilson Bentley at work<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In his later years, he reflected on the adolescent passion that would become his life\u2019s work:<\/p>\n

I became possessed with a great desire to show people something of this wonderful loveliness, an ambition to become, in some measure, its preserver.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And so he did. Wilson Bentley, who comes alive in Duncan Blanchard\u2019s wonderful 1998 biography The Snowflake Man<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), grew famous as Snowflake Bentley, establishing himself as the world\u2019s first snowflake photographer and enrapturing vast audiences with nature\u2019s masterworks of ephemeral perfection.<\/p>\n

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Half a century after he first grew enchanted with the photomicroscopy of snowflakes, in a 1922 article for Popular Mechanics<\/em>, Bentley extolled the rewards of this art purchased by physical hardship in below-freezing temperatures:<\/p>\n

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 photomicrographical study.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Months before his death, his life\u2019s work was finally published under the title Snow Crystals<\/em> \u2014 a scrumptious monograph of 2,500 of his most beguiling photographs, which remains in print today as Snowflakes in Photographs<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

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Complement with artist Rose-Lynn Fisher\u2019s haunting photomicroscopy of tears cried under various emotions<\/a> and these gorgeous vintage illustrations of scientific process and phenomena<\/a> \u2014 including an early diagram of snowflake geometries \u2014 from a French physics textbook predating the widespread application of photography, then revisit the story of how, a generation before Bentley, the young photographer John Adams Whipple changed our relationship to impermanence with his pioneering astrophotography<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Brain Pickings<\/em> is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired<\/em> UK and <\/em>The Atlantic<\/em>, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>. Email: brainpicker@brainpickings.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hardly any scientific finding has permeated popular culture more profoundly, transmuted its truth into a more pervasive clich\u00e9, or inspired more uninspired college application essays than the fact that no two snowflakes are alike. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":106597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[401,1177,391,304,1820],"class_list":["post-152591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-environment","tag-inspirational","tag-nature","tag-science","tag-snow-flakes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}