Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
Wilson Bentley was not your average explorer. Explorers are supposed to face peril as they venture across unknown territory. If they are lucky, they return home to a hero’s welcome. If they die along the way, well, that might only enhance their reputation, albeit posthumously.
Bentley was a simple bachelor farmer who lived most of his life with his mother and seldom left home. But he was an intrepid explorer nonetheless. His adventures weren’t across some far horizon, but inward. He wasn’t looking to discover the larger world, but the smaller one.
He found that world all around him on his family’s homestead in Jericho. It arrived each winter in the form of snow. What many Vermonters saw as an inconvenience to be endured until spring, Bentley regarded as manna from the heavens. In a fastidious frenzy, he would scurry around his bulky camera, which stood atop a tall, ostensibly portable table, and take incredible detailed photographs of the snow, images that would startle the world and earn him the nickname “Snowflake.” He would famously comment that in his extensive experience he had seen no two snowflakes that were alike.
Wilson Bentley’s origins couldn’t have been more ordinary. Bentleys had been farming in Vermont pretty much since the state’s founding. So, when Wilson was born in 1865, people naturally expected the boy to become a farmer someday. As he grew up, Bentley gained a reputation for being one of the best potato diggers around. Despite his slender frame, the boy had a flair for hard work.
But he also had a dreamy quality that sometimes distracted him from his chores. The boy liked nothing better than to sit for hours and contemplate the tiny wonders of nature, a feather, a drop of water, a fragment of stone. He had the soul of an artist and the brain of a scientist.
But the realities of farm life meant that Bentley received little education. He first attended school when he was 14, and then only briefly. That’s not to say his education was completely neglected. His mother, Fanny, was a former teacher and taught him what she could. Bentley also spent hours on his own scouring the family encyclopedia.
Though Bentley’s pensiveness distracted him from farm work, his parents decided to encourage, or at least humor, the trait. Fanny had an old microscope left over from her teaching days, and gave it to Bentley when he was 15.
From the beginning, Bentley was obsessed with snow crystals, the tiny pieces that make up snowflakes. (Technically speaking, “Snow Crystal” Bentley would have been a more apt nickname.) He would put one on a piece of glass, slip it under the microscope and stare, transfixed by its intricate beauty, until it melted away. Wanting to capture what he saw, Bentley took to sketching pictures of the crystals.
“Under the microscope I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty,” he said years later. He often used the scientifically incorrect term “snowflakes” to avoid confusing people. “(I)t seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design; and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind. I became possessed with a great desire to show people something of this wonderful loveliness, an ambition to become, in some measure, its preserver.”
He was inevitably disappointed with his sketches; the crystals always melted before he could capture their details.
The answer, he decided, lay in the young art of photography, so he asked his parents for a camera. His father opposed the idea. “It cost, even then, $100!” Bentley later explained. “You can imagine, or perhaps you cannot, unless you know what the average farmer is like, how my father hated to spend all that money on what seemed to him a boy’s ridiculous whim.”
That Bentley got one for his 17th birthday speaks volumes about his mother’s persuasive skills. Others may have wondered about Bentley’s sanity as he seemingly frittered away hours on his strange hobby, but Fanny stuck by him. Photography would, of course, prove more than a whim and he would use that camera for the next half century.
While other Vermonters braced for winter, Bentley found himself yearning for the first snow. When it fell, he avoided farm work at all costs. It could wait; the snow crystals wouldn’t. Bentley’s passion became a sore spot between him and his brother, Charles, who lived in the front of the house with his own family. Charles didn’t share his mother’s appreciation of Wilson’s work and felt his brother wasn’t pulling his weight.
Bentley worked his magic in an unheated room at the back of the house. It took him two years to perfect his technique. Bentley rigged his new camera to peer through his microscope and affixed the two instruments to an old table. His arms proved too short to reach the focus knob when his head was under the camera’s cloth hood, so he devised a system of strings and discs to do the trick. As he worked, he held his breath or breathed to the side to avoid melting his subject. Through trial and error, mostly error, he learned to produce bright, sharp photos of the crystals.
Though Bentley perfected his technique, he continued to labor in obscurity for years. That might have been part of the friction with Charles. All of Bentley’s labors never seemed to bring in much money.
Finally, in 1898, he began to get noticed. The mineralogical museum at Harvard University purchased all the snow crystal photographs he had made to date, 400 in all. Also that year George Henry Perkins, a science professor at the University of Vermont, saw Bentley’s photos and worked with him to write an article for a popular science magazine.
Bentley was beginning to make a name for himself. Soon every self-respecting university and museum was seeking copies of his work. And the general public was learning of him through articles in National Geographic, Popular Mechanics and the New York Times Magazine. Bentley was finding fame, though little fortune.
Mary Mullet, a writer for The American Magazine, ventured out to Jericho in 1925 to meet the famed snow lover. She found him living alone in what she described as the unkempt fashion of a bachelor – his mother had died almost 20 years earlier. Still, Mullet seems to have found Bentley charming.
During the interview, Bentley recalled vividly the day he finally produced a clear print of a snow crystal: “I felt almost like falling to my knees beside that (camera) apparatus. I knew then what I had dreamed of doing was possible. It was the greatest moment of my life.”
Despite the nickname, Bentley didn’t limit himself to the study of snow crystals. He was fascinated with all kinds of weather. He took to studying raindrops, devising an ingenious means of measuring their size by catching them in flour. Forty years later, scientists with the U.S. Soil Conservation Service would borrow the technique to study the intensity of rainfall. Bentley’s meteorological theories about how ice, snow crystals and raindrops form have withstood the test of later scientists.
During his life, he would make more than 5,000 photos of snow crystals, none alike. The reason for the differences, he said, was that as they fell, the crystals would change due to the varying temperature, density and humidity of the air through which they passed.
Implicit in that statement, however, is the point that some snow crystals might well be identical when they form. Indeed, Bentley once commented that there is no “good reason to doubt that when they started from equal heights on their journey earthward, many of the snow crystals were exactly alike …”
In 1988, more than a half century after Bentley’s death, a scientist collecting snow crystals aboard a plane found two that were identical. Bentley was right even in this belief that contradicts what so many people know about him.
And who could have doubted him? After all, if there was a territory that Bentley had explored and knew better than anyone, it was snow.
