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Editors note Editors note by Peter Wolf Well, another year has past and Bentley's Birthday was , February 7th (Recent discovery that his birthdate is the 7th, not the 9th, as previously believed) . The Jericho Historical Society celebrated Bentley's 145th Birthday on February 4th at the Old Mill in Jericho with a presentation by Mark Breen, Senior Meteorologist of the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium, St. Johnsbury. Mark, who is the noted Vermont Public Radio (VPR) “Eye on the Sky” weather anchor-man, spoke on the vagaries and trends in past and present Vermont winters. His illustrated presentation included remarks to celebrate the 145th birthday of “Snowflake” Bentley (1865 – 1931), and his seminal role in the early scientific development of meteorology. A DVD copy of the presentation will be available at the Old Mill Craft Shop and on the JHS website. This newsletter we have an article by Duncan Blanchard on the "Humor in the Life of Wilson Bentley" and an intersting article from Jon Nelson "The Frosty WHIMS of Bentley". We also received some information from Wayne Howe on a piece in the works for Spanish Television. We are always getting a steady stream of requests for photos for publications ranging from news and magazine articles to textbooks and holiday cards from various companies. This years publications include National Geographic, Science World, Scholastic, a display at The Smithsonian Institute and a few educational Aptitude Testing organizations have been using Bentley images.. We are still looking for teaching materials on Bentley and snow, so please share your lesson plans/units with others through the message board or email us. As always, purchases at the Gift Shop and The Old Red Mill help preserve the legacy of Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley. Thanks to everyone who supported us this past holiday season!!! If you would like to contribute writings to this newsletter please Humor in the Life of Wilson Bentley In the sixty or more articles written by Wilson Bentley, there is little indication that he had a sense of humor. But in my conversations with people who knew him, it became clear that he did indeed see humor in many of the things that happened in his everyday life, and practical jokes were part of the fun in growing up. Not only did he initiate these jokes, but some were played on him. When very young, his delight in watching and trying to understand the ways of the birds resulted in learning how to imitate their calls. Sometimes when his mother was working in the house near an open window, he would hide outside and loudly whistle the call of a particular bird. Eventually his mother, curious to see this bird, would come out of the house only to find her young son grinning at her. On other occasions the jokes would be on visiting relatives and sometimes did not work the way Bentley hoped. A great aunt from Montana came to visit one time when Bentley had a red squirrel in a cage with a wheel for the squirrel to run on. One evening he let the squirrel out near her. The squirrel ran up the outside of her dress and bit her ear. The young Bentley got no supper that night and his great aunt returned to Montana, probably vowing never to return to Jericho again. His niece, Alice, had fond recollections of her uncle. “He always had some project going. He had his croquet games Sunday afternoon. There was always lots of lemonade, cookies, ice cream some days, and he had a special fudge he made from white sugar, and what they used to call vanilla drips. It was delicious. And he had evening parties when we’d hang out Japanese lanterns. One Halloween he scared everybody to death. He fixed up a large bough from a balsam tree. It was wrapped in sheets and he had a face with a florescent design, built like a skeleton. It came out of the third floor window. Bentley liked to play tricks. Alice told me about the time a cousin came to spend the night with one of her sisters. They were to spend the night in his spare bedroom. “Well he went up there before that night. We used to have wood slats under the bed springs. He sawed then almost in two. So after they had been in bed awhile they heard snapping and cracking and wondered what that was. Pretty soon they found out. The bed went down.” Alice told me what happened in Burlington one day when her uncle saw a big cloud over the Vermont Hotel. “He started on the run with his camera. Came out of Lapierre’s camera store. A cop took after him. He thought he stole the camera from Lapierres. Uncle said I’ll see you later, and kept running. He got the picture from the roof of the hotel and then told the cop what he was doing. He wanted that cloud before it got away from him.” Bentley’s niece Amy told me this story. “In the springtime he loved to go out sugaring. He had a sugaring house up back. One time he was up there boiling sap well into the night. He came back and all my brothers and sisters were around. He said he was working up there and suddenly saw these two bright eyes staring into the darkness. He said they were the eyes of lynx. We were horrified. All we could think of were these animals up there, the lynx. Uncle said ‘Yes, two big eyes. They were made of links of chain.” Sometime in 1917 photographers from Pathe News showed up in Jericho to make a short movie of Bentley taking photomicrographs of snow crystals. They had him wear his best dress-up clothes: white shirt and collar, black tie, dark overcoat and a soft felt hat. Bentley must have fussed and fumed over this, as he never worked out of doors with his camera, and he certainly never dressed up when he did his photography. Since the thin broom splint he used to transfer a snow crystal from his blackboard to a microscope slide would never show up in the movie, the photographers had him use a tapered piece of wood over a foot long and as thick as a pencil. This only served to increase his irritation. But it must have reached record levels when the photographers decided it would be nice to have snow falling while their cameras were rolling. But it wasn’t snowing that day, though there was snow on the ground. No problem. What passed as the special effects team of Pathe News leapt into action. They scooped some snow from the ground into a basket and had Bentley’s nephew take it to a second floor bedroom where he tossed handfuls of it into the air from an open window. It was a disaster. Instead of having soft white snowflakes descend slowly and uniformly over Bentley, large chunks of snow fell like hailstones, some striking his hat, others his shoulders, producing splashes of snow that dotted his hat and coat with white smears. No matter. Snow was snow. The movie camera kept rolling and captured Bentley in his element. The movie runs only a few minutes in length, but it is the only known motion picture of Bentley in action. The still photographs taken that day would be used many times by Bentley and others, and are still being used today. On quiet evenings Bentley often took his clarinet up on the hill behind the farmhouse and play for his own entertainment. But the neighbors below were entertained too, as they heard the soft notes of the music drifting down from above. Sometimes Bentley would play from his own porch. Alice said you could hear it all over Nashville. He’d play all kinds of music. Not only did Bentley entertain people from his porch and hillside with his clarinet, but at an evening’s gathering at the schoolhouse he would with his violin and sense of humor imitate birdcalls, frogs, barnyard animals, and certain people in the village! During the long, cold winter evenings the people of the Nashville section of Jericho entertained themselves with square dances. Sometimes they would gather at the Bentley home, other times at one of the neighboring farmhouses. Whether the dances were held at the Bentley home or elsewhere, it was always Bentley who did most of the piano playing. Arthur Pratt, a young Bentley neighbor, told me an incredible story of what happened one night when the dance was being held at a neighbor’s house. He and a few other boys quietly left the house and went outside to where Bentley had left his horse and buggy. They had decided to play a trick on him. Quickly they reversed the wheels on the buggy, so that the larger rear wheels were on front while the smaller front wheels were on the back. This gave a strange and lopsided appearance to the buggy. Pratt and his friends hid in some bushes to eagerly await Bentley’s reaction when he came out and saw what had happened. And what was his reaction? There wasn’t any! “He went home like that,” said Pratt in amazement, “and drove that buggy several days before he noticed it. I don’t know what you call that.” One might call it absentmindedness or one might just call it an example of Bentley’s mischievous humor. When I told this story to Alice, she said “I remember that because I rode with him out to Jericho Center with the big wheels still in front. He went out to the Jericho Center village store, but he didn’t let on; course he knew about it the night he came home. He let them know it didn’t bother him at all.” Alice asked her uncle why he was being so different from all the others in driving his buggy that way. He told her there was nothing wrong in being different from other people. That was a lesson in courage a little girl never forgot. Being different, however, sometimes caused interesting and amusing clashes with the law. Take the time that Bentley, who in addition to his interest in the water wonders of the atmosphere was also an avid amateur geologist, was down along the river in Richmond collecting stones. He picked some up, inspected them, tossed most back, but kept a few interesting specimens to take back home. “There was a young woman living alone,” Amy told me, “She saw him down there wandering around. She got nervous. His actions were peculiar, so she called the sheriff and told him that this man was acting kind of funny. So the sheriff, Mike Murphy, came down, saw uncle, and said, ‘Humph, I might have known it was you.’” My last example probably was humorous to most people but to Bentley it was a source of joy and delight. In April 1926 he was on a lecture tour that took him to several cities, including Philadelphia and New York City. He wrote an account of the trip in the Burlington Free Press. In New York he visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As he wandered down the halls, he gazed at both ancient and modern statues, admired the gem stones, and nodded approvingly at many of the paintings, especially those of landscapes. But he had nothing good to say about what he saw in the “portrait section,” and let his readers know exactly what was wrong. “I looked in vain for one really pretty face there. It seems such a pity, with all the wealth of material at hand in America, that the rare beauty and glory of the American girl has not been reproduced on canvas by some master painter’s hand. If art, or that part of art reproducing portraits, concerns itself only with the commonplace, the homely and the ugly, then I have no great admiration for this part of art. “ As if to refute what he had seen in the portrait paintings, Bentley walked along Broadway near Times Square, and stood in Grand Central Station where he saw many faces: “. . . of rare beauty. I think many Vermonters know of the writer’s interest in smiles from the viewpoint of art and beauty. On my trip I found many girls possessing charming smiles. When complimented and questioned if they knew why they smiled prettily, the lucky possessors answer was invariably ‘no.’ So it seems hardly anyone knows the why and wherefore of a pretty smile. “ Duncan C. Blanchard
Spanish Video Crew Reports On Bentley Bentley's story continues to draw interest from all over. In December a film crew working for Radio Television Espanola came to the Old Red Mill to tell the story of Bentley's work to the Spanish speaking world. The two person crew filmed the objects in the gallery and interviewed Wayne Howe about Bentley's life and work. The interviewers were interested in how other people in town viewed Bentley. The piece is scheduled to be show in Spain sometime in the next few months. The documentary film maker who conducted the interview was Guillermo Fesser. Formally of Madrid and now living in the US, he writes and reports stories for Spanish television and radio. Mr. Fesser's goal is to broaden the Spanish people's understanding of the United States. As Spaniards may not fully understand how large and complex a country is, Vermonters may not appreciate that Spain is more than sunny and warm fishing villages and cattle farms. Spain has snow! There are a number of ski areas and winter storms can play havoc on the best made plans. Photos from Madrid this past January depicted snow laden cars. One passerby scrawled NIEVE (snow) on a windshield with their finger. The interviewers drove six hours from their homes on the Hudson south of Albany, NY. Armed with a small digital camera they did not need lights or heavy equipment. This is in marked contrast to film crew of years gone by. Everything is getting smaller, except apparently, interest in Snowflake Bentley. The Frosty WHIMS of Bentley The most comprehensive study of frost and small ice formations was published way back in 1907 by Wilson A. Bentley. His article was split into five successive issues of the Monthly Weather Review [1] with the title “Studies of Frost and Ice Crystals”. In the article, Bentley details his classification system for frost and some related ice forms, and gives examples of nearly every type – in total 274 examples in photographs. His classification system is ingenious, the first (and probably only) classification system for frost and ice on surfaces. Unfortunately for such an extensive, pioneering article, few books or articles cite it as a reference. Bentley’s classification system gave each crystal form a 3-letter label. The first letter gave the type of frost or place of deposition. He designated five such types: window-frost (W), hoarfrost (H), window-ice (I), massive ice (M), and hailstones (S). Considering the first letter of each type, we could call this the WHIMS system. Briefly, “W” includes curvy frost that forms within a relatively thick condensation film on surfaces (in his studies, windowpanes), “H” includes the long, densely packed, straight needles sticking out of exposed surfaces on cold mornings outside, “I” is ice that forms on relatively dry surfaces, “M” is ice that forms in “thick” bodies of water like puddles and lakes, and “S” is hailstones. The second letter designated the characteristic form of the crystal. In all, he designated 20 types, but some letters were used for several forms. For example, although “B” would designate only a branch-like form, “C” could designate either column-like or coral-like forms. So, presumably, “WC” could mean either window-frost crystals in a column form or window-frost crystals in a coral form. “T” is similar in that it stands for either tabular or tooth-like forms. However, of the crystal types classified by Bentley, there was little confusion because W-types had only one C-characteristic, and that was WCG, or window-frost resembling columns. The other C-characteristic occurred only in massive ice, specifically MCF, massive ice resembling coral. Even if there had been two WC types, they would be distinguished by their third letter, the letter that designated how common the form appeared (at least to him). Specifically, an “A” would indicate that this is the most common form, a “B” would be less common. In principle, this could continue until “Z”, though the ones he classified only went as far as “K”. For example, in the most-used letter “F”, we distinguish two WF forms because one is WFC, a filament-like form that is relatively common, and WFJ, a fiber-like form that was rare. The other two Fs refer to filament-like and flower-like forms. Bentley’s WHIMS system is extensive and well-thought out, but it doesn’t include frost of two origins. In particular, film-frost on non-glass surfaces is common, but very hard to see unless some white hoar crystals grow up and off the surface. In addition to revealing the pattern of film-frost, the hoar that grows up off the frozen film can have it’s own characteristics. This case is hard to fit with Bentley’s classification, yet I see it far more often than pure film-frost. He was aware of this case, as he mentions such dual types in his discussion of the stages of window-ice formation; specifically, he divides their growth into four stages with the fourth stage being hoarfrost. This difficulty is related to another shortcoming: it is not clear what exact purpose he meant for the second letter. He wrote that this letter represents the characteristic form, and for hoar, he clearly refers to characteristics of the crystals, labeling them either columnar (C) or tabular (T). But with window-frost and window-ice, it is often hard to distinguish the individual crystals, and the characteristic pattern one sees are partly, sometimes wholly, a consequence of the positions of the crystals, not their individual shapes. Judging by the number of examples, the type he enjoyed the most was type IFA, featherform window-ice crystals. As this type includes a wide range of patterns, it’s too bad he didn’t create IFB, C, D, etc. to distinguish some of the patterns. These patterns include my favorite formation, which I nicknamed “striped tail frost”. He called them “the most strange and rare specimens of beautiful feather-form window-ice crystals”. He likened their pattern to an evergreen vine, and gave some description of the special conditions that produced them. For the images he showed, he explained a mechanism in which the windowpane cooled from the right edge to the left edge, and because of sunshine and “zero weather”, the temperature change was large. Below I show a similar frost formation, except the frost is on the roof of a black car, not a windowpane.
A close up of three bands of the tail, shown below, suggests that the pattern consists of many thin, slightly curving ice blades. But the magnification from my compact camera does not reveal a clear reason for the alternating dark and light bands.
In other formations, I’ve noticed that the whiter parts are hoar crystals that either stick up much higher than other regions or are denser [2]. Bentley offered the former reason for the white bands. But it almost appears that the white parts are where new blades start, to fill in the gap left by two existing blades that diverge. If this is the case, then the white bands are places where the hoar is denser. If I see this pattern again, I’ll try to get a clearer close-up image to help determine the origin of the white bands. Bentley’s article should be read by everyone who wants to learn about frost. It is easy to read and contains a lot of careful observations, including high magnifications of frost features, and many good ideas. For example, Bentley argued that all columnar hoarfrost probably starts after small condensation droplets on a surface freezes. After observing a lot of hoarfrost over the past few years, I came to the same idea (though I suspect it applies to tabular hoar as well). Unfortunately, another one of his statements did not stand the test of time very well:
Even though few windowpanes these days get cold enough to frost, many outdoor surfaces do, and these show the same patterns Bentley classified as well as some new patterns. And although his WHIMS system has seen little-to-no use, it may have inspired a similar classification system that cloud scientists now use for snow crystals. The snow system, begun by Ukichiro Nakaya, a scientist inspired by Bentley, wasn’t published until nearly 50 years had passed [3]. Twelve years later, Nakaya’s system was extended to the Magono and Lee version used today [4]. But Bentley’s system is open-ended; that is, one can keep adding rarer and rarer forms to it. So in principle, his system never needs to be extended [5]. It seems once again that Bentley was way ahead of the pack. [1] This article is freely available on the internet. The five parts are at the links below. All 274 images are at link e). a) http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/035/mwr-035-08-0348.pdf
Editors note HAPPY BIRTHDAY SNOWFLAKE BENTLEY! by Emilie Alexander Editors note by Peter Wolf Well, another year has past and Bentley's Birthday was , February 7th (Recent discovery that his birthdate is the 7th, not the 9th, as previously believed) . Emilie Alexander fills us in about the birthday celebration at the Jericho Town Library, which rang in One-hundred forty-four years ago that Wilson Bentley was born on the Jericho farm where he lived his entire life. We continue our Jericho Center Weather conditions which are updated to a
web page every 15 minutes and historical weather data charts are also viewable. Bentley would record the weather conditions in a notebook throughout the day, each day, his whole life. Our current weather station records data automatically and I wonder if Bentley would rely on the new technology or the "old school" ways of manually recording the data?.
Ray Miglionico from Vermont Snowflakes recently acquired some new photos by Bentley that we have never seen before and we present some for the first time here. We have an article by Duncan Blanchard "Bentley’s Struggle to Photograph Snow Crystals", and a mind bending article from Jon Nelson "The Bentley length scale and snow crystal variety". We also received some information from Wayne Howe on an exhibit at the Middlebury College Museum of Art in Middlebury, Vermont We are always getting a steady stream of requests for photos for publications ranging from news and magazine articles to textbooks and holiday cards from various companies. This years publications include Yankee Magazine, Inc Magazine, The N.Y. Post, The Old Farmers Almanac and Ranger Rick. We are still looking for teaching materials on Bentley and snow, so please share your lesson plans/units with others through the message board or email us. As always, purchases at the Gift Shop and The Old Red Mill help preserve the legacy of Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley. Thanks to everyone who supported us this past holiday season!!! If you would like to contribute writings to this newsletter please HAPPY BIRTHDAY SNOWFLAKE BENTLEY! Refrains of Happy Birthday Snowflake Bentley rang form the rafters of the Jericho Town Library at the annual Jericho celebration of the birth of our noted citizen Wilson Bentley. He would have been 144 years old this February 7. ( I know there is a discrepancy in the date but the birth certificate in the Jericho Town Hall says February 7 not 9). Many children and adults gathered to hear about the life of Bentley as narrated by Elaine Salsbury of the Jericho Historical Society, see slides of his life and snowflakes. Snowflake Bentley (portrayed by Devon Mendicino) appeared and shared some of his more unusual snowflakes with the crowd. Snowflake crafts were enjoyed by the younger set and birthday cake donated by Grace Mobbs from Cakes by Grace was enjoyed by all. Bentely would have been pleased to see that the town thinks a great deal of his work and marvels today at this expertise and the beauty of the individual flake. Thanks to the Jericho Town Library for celebrating Bentley's B-day. Bentley’s Struggle to Photograph Snow Crystals At about age fourteen, Wilson Bentley’s interest and curiosity about the world of nature had so overwhelmed him that he no longer was interested only in reading about it in books. He had to see this world for himself. On his fifteenth birthday on February 7, 1885, he received the gift of an old microscope that had been used by his mother during her school-teaching days. From that time on, he was not the same. He had found a focus in life. He became obsessed with the fragile beauty of common things from the world around him as seen through the microscope, especially the delicate beauty of the snow crystals. Years later, Bentley had this to say about the beginning of this life-long obsession. “When the other boys of my age were playing with popguns and slingshots, I was absorbed in studying things under this microscope: drops of water, tiny fragments of stone a feather from a bird’s wing. But always, from the very beginning, it was the snowflakes that fascinated me most. . . . Under the microscope I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty, and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. I became possessed with a great desire to show people something of this wonderful loveliness, an ambition to become, in some measure, its preserver.”
As if Bentley did not have enough difficulty finding a snow crystal and getting this tiny sliver of ice safely under the microscope, he had to be extremely careful not to breathe out in the direction of the crystal; otherwise it would melt instantly before his eyes. Holding his breath while looking through the microscope, he tried to sketch on a piece of paper exactly what his eyes were seeing. When he could hold his breath no longer, he turned his head away, rapidly exhaled, gulped in another lungful of cold air, and returned to his drawing. This went on for snow crystal after snow crystal, all different, and for storm after storm, not for one but for three years. By this time, he had about four hundred drawings, but he still had problems. Even though he was willing to sit there in the bone-chilling temperatures of the woodshed and patiently continue to draw, nature placed a severe limit on the time he had to work. Snow crystals are made of ice, and water molecules evaporate or sublimate from ice, even at temperatures far below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, though at a much slower rate than they do from liquid water at a far higher temperature. Another problem facing Bentley was that the evaporation does not occur at the same rate from all places on the crystal. It occurs much more rapidly from the tips or sharp edges to flatten or smooth it and thus distort the crystal as it shrinks in size. Bentley probably had less than five minutes to get the drawings done. Anyone who has seen the beautiful but complex structure of snow crystals knows that even fifty minutes would not be enough to draw them. Faced with this problem, Bentley knew he would never be able to capture these “miracles of beauty” in his drawings. Somehow, somewhere, he would have to find another way. Increasingly frustrated in making drawings of snow crystals seen under the microscope, his thoughts turned to photography. He wondered if it would be possible to use what was then a relatively new technology barely out of its infancy, and adapt it to make photographs of snow crystals. Before 1880 wet plate photography was commonly used. But in the late 1870s dry plate photography was developed in England, and by the early 1880s was available in America. Dry plates, unlike wet plates, could be exposed, put aside, and developed days or weeks later. This new, easier method of photography arrived just in time for Wilson Bentley.
Henry Seeley, about twenty years older than Bentley, was born in the valley not far from the Bentley farm. He served in the Civil War, and in 1872 opened a photographic studio in Bridgeport, Connecticut. During frequent visits to Jericho, he often talked to Bentley about photography. After Bentley’s death, Seeley said: “He was a genius, known the world over. No question about that. … I got him his first camera, and showed him the making of plates, and whenever there was a new book published on photography I used to send it to him, but it was not many years before he could send me information. “ Seeley does not mention a microscope or photomicrography, so the camera he got for Bentley may have been a small one for photographing scenes around the valley a year or two before Bentley decided to try photomicrography. Nevertheless, even if Seeley was not directly involved in Bentley’s pioneering experiments in the photomicrography of snow crystals, it seems clear that he introduced Bentley to photography. This was all Bentley needed to go where no one had gone before in the photography of the natural world. Bentley probably read all he could find on photography, especially photomicrography, and concluded he could progress no further in his quest until he had the proper kind of microscope and a camera. But where would he get the money to buy such technical equipment? He was still a teenager. Besides, his regular chores on the farm left him with little time to work elsewhere to earn the money he needed. It was his mother who convinced a reluctant father that they just had to find the money that young Wilson needed. Years later, Bentley told what happened.
“When I was seventeen years old, my mother persuaded my father to buy for me the camera and microscope which I developed into the apparatus I am still using. It cost, even then, one hundred dollars! 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. “Somehow my mother got him to spend the money, but he never came to believe it had been worthwhile. He and my elder brother always thought I was fooling away my time, fussing with snowflakes.” When the camera and microscope arrived, Bentley must have spent many weeks experimenting, trying different ways to connect them together and to rapidly focus on the ground glass screen at the rear of the camera whatever was on the stage of the microscope. His new compound microscope was the lowest-priced model of about ten made by the Bausch and Lomb Optical Company. It came with a three-quarter inch focal length objective of wide aperture. “Because of its simplicity,” the Bausch and Lomb catalog said, “It may be used by inexperienced hands without detriment or injury to it.” The bellows camera, about seven inches square, could be extended nearly three feet. At the back was provision for focusing on a ground or clear glass screen and for the attachment of a photographic plate holder. But before he could do any experimentation with his new microscope and camera, he had to have something to place them upon. He obtained a wood table about three feet high, a bit over two feet in length, and slightly more than a foot wide. The carpentry skills displayed by the use of screws rather than nails in the table, were in marked contrast to the jury-rigged frame that was built and placed on the table to hold the camera and microscope. The wooden frame, held together only by nails, had the appearance of being slapped together hastily in order to get on with the experiment. This suggests that Bentley had obtained the table elsewhere and had himself made the frame which, though crude and by no means elegant, served his purposes admirably for over fifty years. In this and in other things, Bentley showed that he believed in that old bit of Yankee philosophy: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The camera took up so much room on the table that, in order to accommodate the microscope, Bentley had to make the frame long enough to stick out about a foot beyond the end of the table. He placed the microscope on the frame extension and bent the upper part backwards ninety degrees around a hinged joint. He removed both the eyepiece of the microscope and the lens of the camera, then pushed the microscope toward the camera until the tube or main body had seated itself in a light-tight sleeve attached to the front of the camera. He next used either the fine or coarse focusing knob to get a sharp, magnified image on the camera’s ground-glass screen of whatever was in front on the microscope stage. For many people, the focusing would have posed no problem, but for Bentley, slight of build and with short arms, it was nearly insurmountable. Standing at the back of the camera under a large black cloth to keep out stray light, he strained to reach the focusing knob to sharpen the fuzzy image he saw on the ground-glass screen. He could not reach it, so he had to take a few steps to the front of the camera to make a slight focusing adjustment. Often he had to repeat this, and soon realized that when he worked with a snow crystal, he would have to move much more rapidly. But how would he do it? He did this in a very clever way. He had noticed that when the microscope was in its bent-back position, the axis of rotation of the fine-focus knob was horizontal, parallel to, and below the optical axis of the microscope. On both sides of the frame he attached vertically a short piece of wood with a metal eyelet atop each piece. Near the back of the camera and on both sides of the frame he attached a wooden wheel. He next took a long piece of string and wound it a couple times around the focusing knob, then led it through both eyelets and back to the wooden wheels where he attached it. With this arrangement Bentley could look at the fuzzy image on the ground-glass plate, and turn the wooden wheels until the focusing knob brought the image on the plate into a sharp focus. The beauty of this was that he could do it in just a few seconds. But how do you get a snow crystal on the glass slide in front of the microscope? Bentley had solved this problem during the long months of earlier winters when he tried to draw the crystals he saw under his microscope. He collected the crystals on a small black board. Standing outside the woodshed, he watched the snowflakes and crystals falling on the board and occasionally looked at them with a magnifying glass. If he did not see one he wanted to photograph, he would brush the snow off with a turkey feather and start anew. When he found a crystal he wanted to photograph, he would rush inside the woodshed to transfer it to a microscope slide. Here began the most delicate part of the whole process. Using a broom splint from one of his mother’s brooms, he gently touched it to the middle of the snow crystal, picked it up and placed it in the center of the microscope slide. He needed a steady hand to do this. Some of the crystals were only a sixteenth of an inch in diameter. Commenting on this in later years, Bentley said, “My hand is perfectly steady. . . . have never used liquor, tobacco, or any other stimulants that affect the nerves.” The delicate part of the process over, Bentley began a race against time. Quickly he placed the slide under an observation microscope to make sure the snow crystal was unbroken. If it was, he placed the slide on the microscope stage and hastened to the back of the camera. He rapidly obtained a focus on the ground glass, removed it, replaced it with a photographic plate and exposed it to the magnified image of the snow crystal for anywhere from about thirty to three hundred seconds. For light he simply pointed his camera toward a window in the side of the woodshed and allowed the light to pass through the snow crystal on its way to the photographic plate. Using this technique of transmitted light, Bentley expected his photomicrographs to show not only the surface but the internal structure of the snow crystal. Since he had no use for the camera lens and had removed it, he had no shutter to open and close for the proper exposure time. He made his own shutter with a small black card mounted in front of the objective. He removed the card for the required exposure time, then replaced it. The plate was then ready for developing. Bentley probably completed the camera-microscope assembly in †he late fall of 1883 and eagerly looked forward to the first snows of winter. Did he obtain instant success in his quest to capture the image of a snow crystal? He did not. He struggled for weeks on end with the apparatus but nothing seemed to work. “Here I was with this expensive apparatus which had been given to me so reluctantly. I had been sure I could do wonderful things with it, but I failed over and over again! . . . If there had only been someone to explain what was wrong! But away off here on a farm there was nobody to help me. Again and again I failed. The winter slipped away, and I was almost heartbroken. But by the next season I had found the secret of my trouble. I began to use a very small ‘stop’--- a thin plate, with a tiny opening to shut out most of the light. With this and a longer exposure, I got a clear image. . . .” The “tiny opening “ was probably the smallest of four medium-sized holes in a metal disc mounted just beneath the microscope stage. The disc --- a revolving diaphragm --- could be rotated to bring any of the holes directly beneath the stage and thus control the amount of light passing through the snow crystal and the microscope. The smallest hole had a diameter about one sixteenth of an inch, the largest was five-eights of an inch. It appears that during that first winter Bentley used the largest opening in an attempt to get a lot of light rapidly onto his film and thus lowering the time required to get the picture. This was fatal. With a large opening, the depth of field was very small, and it was extremely difficult to get a sharp focus. When he finally used the smallest opening on the disc, the resultant increase in the depth of field made it possible to quickly obtain a sharp, crisp focus. A longer exposure was now necessary, but it gave the “clear image” he was seeking. Bentley later said: “The day 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 worshipping it! I knew then that what I had dreamed of doing was possible. It was the greatest moment of my life.” This was on January 15, 1885. It was a dark, overcast day during which about five inches of snow fell outside the woodshed. With eager anticipation Bentley probably developed the first of five negatives taken that day, long before he had to turn his attention to the evening chores. Though he did not know it, Bentley’s success that day in the woodshed had produced the world’s first photomicrographs of snow crystals. He was still only nineteen years old! From that moment on, his magnificent obsession with the snow crystals never waned, and he faithfully returned to his studies every winter of the forty-six that remained in his life. On Sunday, March 1, 1931, a “lovely day” as Bentley described it, with an early morning temperature of twelve degrees rising to thirty-four later in the day, he photographed a single snow crystal. That brought his total collection of photographs to 5,381! There would be no more. After forty-seven successive winters of snow crystal photography, he had taken his last picture. His old battered camera would never be used again. World Famous
Photographers Tip Hat to Bentley Doug and Mike Starn are known for their manipulations of technique and materials that create arresting photographs. A small exhibit of their work can be seen through April 19th at the Middlebury College Museum of Art in Middlebury, Vermont. The museum recently acquired photomicrographs of snowflakes, and other works of these well regarded photographers. The identical twin brothers first began photographing objects at age thirteen. Now, at 48, the brothers’ work is exhibited throughout the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney in New York, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the High Museum in Atlanta. Overseas exhibits include Sweden, Britain, the Netherlands and Korea. The exhibit at Middlebury includes snowflakes, as well as works depicting trees similar to an installation being completed for New York’s South Ferry subway terminal. At the entry to the gallery room stands a large print that combined inkjet with varnish and acrylic paint, and measures almost four feet by five. The blend of photography, handmade materials and varnish gave the image an extra dimension. A gun metal blue cast gave the edges of the snowflake a hard and cold edge. In a tip of the hat to Bentley, Emmie Danadio, curator of the exhibit wrote, “The tree and the snowflake images in view are defining subjects for the Starns. This body of work was conceived in Vermont, where the pioneering excursions in photographic microscopy by Wilson Snowflake Bentley (1865-1931) first demonstrated that no two snowflakes are alike. “ A larger work on display is composed of 24 snowflake images. The installation has a sixties modernist ascetic. The images were reproduced using inkjets and then sandwiched between lightweight aluminum and Plexiglas using liquid glue. The snowflakes are all of the same type: delicate lacy dendrite forms characteristic of high humidity. The grid of photos brought to mind a page from Bentley’s book. However, they differed in that they were all of one type and none of the flakes were whole. They all look damaged. None of these photographs would have been retained by Bentley. Produced during snowstorms over the course of three winters in Jay, Vermont, Doug and Mike Starn must have been mindful of the challenges Bentley faced in his work. Bentley’s appreciation for both the science and beauty of snowflakes is found here, though his works are absent. A bit of text on the wall of the gallery captures a common spirit. Doug and Mike Starn found snowflakes, “transient, unique and instantly recognizable.” Bentley recorded similar sentiments. For more information on this exhibit go to http://museum.middlebury.edu/exhibitions Wayne Howe The Bentley length scale and snow crystal variety
“… by means of these wonderfully delicate and exquisite figures, much may be learned of the history of each crystal and the changes through which it has passed in its journey through cloudland.” W. A. Bentley, 1898 “… the crystals will in all probability be greatly modified by passing through atmospheric strata varying so greatly in density, temperature, humidity, etc. That they are greatly modified by these flights in the cloud is clearly shown by the interior structure of many of the crystals. ” W. A. Bentley, 1901 Bentley claimed that the various layers (‘strata’) of air that a snow crystal falls through largely determine the appearance of the crystal. The first direct support of this claim came about 30 years later, from laboratory experiments by Ukichiro Nakaya, a Japanese physicist. Now, 100 years later, probably all cloud scientists would agree with Bentley. So, with all the crystal and cloud research that has been done since Bentley and Nakaya, can we determine the history of a crystal if we see its form? Can we finally do what Bentley said we should be able to do? Hardly. Laboratory experiments have certainly advanced our knowledge of snow, though large, crucial gaps remain and many experiments appear to contradict other experiments. Greater advances have occurred with cloud measurements. For example, researchers recently measured differences in temperature between points less than one centimeter apart in clouds. (Which is not so easy when one is flying at over a hundred meters per second!) Nearly the same sensitivity measurements have been made of cloud humidities and air motions. Although I was not involved in any of these cloud measurements, the researchers gave me data that I used to estimate the size of the layers that Bentley mentioned. Now, knowing the size of the layers does not allow us to know the exact history of a crystal, but it does help us understand something else dear to Bentley: the wonderful variety of snow crystal forms. As far as I know, nobody else has estimated this size, so I took the liberty of naming it the ‘Bentley length’. Before describing what this length is, I should clarify two things. One, the length is not fixed: it depends on the cloud conditions, particularly the temperature. Two, these ‘layers’ are not something one can easily discern by looking at a patch of cloud: the size of a layer depends not only on the properties of the cloud, but also on how fast the crystal can respond to changes in the cloud, particularly temperature changes. Specifically, the length is the average distance a crystal falls through the cloudy air before some fluctuation in air temperature or humidity causes the crystal to make a noticeable change in shape. About this change of shape, one of Nakaya’s great achievements was to demonstrate that snow crystal shape and size is remarkably sensitive to temperature: grow a snow crystal at –11 °C for 30 minutes and it ends up less than half a millimeter across, but grow it at –15 °C, only 4 degrees colder, for the same length of time and the crystal is more than 5 mm across. Using similar data on snow crystals and the above-mentioned data on clouds, I estimated that the Bentley length is about 8 meters at –11 °C, and only 0.8 meters at –15 °C. To a snow crystal, even four degrees is a huge change. To understand the role of the Bentley length in snow crystal variety, it helps to look into all sources of crystal variety. First, consider an analogy. The uniqueness of snow is sometimes compared to the uniqueness of individuals. That we are all unique is well known to be a result of our genes and our environment. Even identical twins who grow up in the same general environment will, despite having the same genes, develop differently due to small differences in their environment. The genes do not determine the person, but rather determine how the development of the person responds to the environment. Similarly, the structure of the initial embryo of ice, the seed that starts a snow crystal, influences how the crystal will respond to the cloudy environment. Concerning the environment, we can divide the crystal environment into that which would occur if all cloud fluctuations were removed, and the small differences in environment caused by the fluctuations. For example, consider a crystal that starts at –15 °C the middle of a cloud that everywhere has an updraft speed of 12 cm/s. At first the crystal slowly cools as it rises. But soon it reaches a size at which it falls faster than the updraft and from then on, the crystal slowly, and continuously, warms as it descends towards cloud base at –8 °C. This history would produce a crystal that may look something like that on the left in the illustration below. Conversely, the crystal would look different if it started at –16 °C or some other temperature. But real clouds have fluctuations in the updraft speed, fluctuations in temperature, and fluctuations in other things. These fluctuations also affect the crystal form, just as the small differences in environment affected the twins. One such fluctuation on the right side of the illustration led to a slightly different crystal. So, that which is unique to a given crystal can be said to have originated from a combination of three sources. The third source, the fluctuations, depends on the Bentley length. To recap, two crystals could be different because they started with different characteristics that affected their final appearance. That’s the first source. The two crystals could instead be different because they started at different temperatures or grew in different clouds. Or, as the third source, the two crystals could have passed through different cloud layers. Bentley also discussed these three sources. He originally assumed that the first one was negligible: Of the tens of thousands now filling the air, an infinitesimal proportion fall on this board; nor is there any good reason to doubt that when they started from equal heights on their journey earthward, many of the snow crystals were exactly alike in shape, and size, and probably in density. But later, through a “fortunate accident” involving a broken water pipe that flooded a cold room in his house, he decided that crystals are also born with individual characteristics that can affect their appearance.
Even with our incomplete knowledge of snow-crystal growth, it is possible to estimate the crystal variety resulting from these sources. Here I define ‘variety’ to mean the number of possible distinguishable crystals that could result from crystals falling through the layers. According to the data, the third source of variety greatly exceeds the second, and the second source greatly exceeds the first. So, the atmospheric ‘layers’, the third source, is likely the main source of crystal individuality. And if one would like to estimate the crystal variety for some set of conditions, one needs to know how many layers a crystal passes through. Here is where we use the Bentley length. To see just how much the Bentley-length source dominates snow crystal variety, we apply a little mathematics to the example in the illustration. According to experiments on ice-crystal growth rates and fall speeds, by the time the crystal falls below cloudbase, it would have fallen through about 1850 meters of air and grown to about 7.6 millimeters across. (Yes, this is a big crystal.) With a Bentley length of 0.8 meters, which is appropriate for the crystal’s starting temperature, the number of layers the crystal passed through would be the 1850 meters divided by the 0.8-meter length, and assuming that half of the layers produced changes to the crystal, the crystal experienced 1156 changes. One example of a change is shown in the illustration. However, the Bentley length depends on temperature, and by the time the crystal gets to cloud base, the length is more than four times larger. If we instead use the average Bentley length for the crystal’s journey, the crystal experienced 468 changes. This might seem like a small number, but we have not yet calculated the variety. When the crystal passed through a given layer, the growth could have sped up or it could have slowed down. In the case of the illustration, the colder region caused the growth to speed up, and this produced the narrower tip and sidebranches. If instead, the fluctuation had been a region of warmer air, the growth would have slowed and the crystal tip would have widened. However, the Bentley length tells us only how many changes occurred during the crystal’s fall to earth; it does not tell us where (or when) each change occurred. Indeed, each change could have occurred at any one of many stages in the crystal’s history. The larger a crystal is, or the closer we choose to inspect the crystal features, the greater the number of stages. Assuming that we can use a good-quality microscope to examine the crystal to 1/1000 of a millimeter, the number of distinct stages for our example is about 3800. At this point, we have everything needed to calculate the variety. Each of the 468 changes were one of two, equally likely types, and could have occurred in any one of the 3800 stages of the crystal’s growth. The resulting number of possibilities is a staggeringly large number: a one followed by 768 zeros or 10768. (For math-inclined readers, this is “3800 choose 468 times 2 to the 468th power.) To get an idea of the immense size of this number, consider that the number of atoms in the entire universe has been estimated to be a 1 followed by only 70 zeros or 1070. The number of snow crystals that have ever formed on Earth is much smaller - 1 followed by only about 35 zeros or 1035. If every crystal that grows under such cloud conditions has equal chance to be any one of these 10768 possible crystal forms, we can be sure that no two of them will be alike. Of course, Bentley instuitively knew this result. But it turns out that we cannot be so sure if we instead examined crystals that were born much closer to the bottom of the cloud. Crystals born near cloud base pass through fewer Bentley lengths, particularly so if the temperature is much warmer than –15 °C. In fact, one can argue that there probably have been two such crystals that appear the same.
The Bentley length depends on fundamental properties of snow crystals and clouds. The values I used here were calculated from a few sets of cloud measurements and one set of snow-crystal growth measurements. As we learn more about both, the values will undoubtedly be refined. But they are still fundamental. The famous physicists Neils Bohr, Arthur Compton, and Max Planck have atomic length scales named after them, lengths learned by most students of atomic physics. Karl Schwarzschild has a size named after him, a size in black-hole physics that depends on the mass of the star, and Peter Debye has a material-dependent length named after him. Wilson A. Bentley now has one for snow. The Bentley length depends on temperature, but nevertheless represents a well-defined property of nature. Will meteorology and physics students in the future learn about the Bentley length? Whether they do or not, it is nice to know that Bentley’s name has been honored with a scientific term, an honor given only to a handful of scientists. W. A. Bentley “Forty years’ study of snow crystals” Monthly Weather Review, Nov. 1924, page 532. He studied the crystals in the room, assuming they all started their growth under the same conditions. However, the editor pointed out in the article that the conditions throughout the room were not necessarily the same. Also, some of the crystals Bentley examined may have been born on the glass slide upon which he was photographing. The form of such crystals can be affected by the glass surface. More details
are in J. Nelson “Origin of diversity in falling snow” Atmos. Chem. Phys., 8
(2008), pages 5669-5682. Can be accessed at http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/8/5669/2008/acp-8-5669-2008.html News From The Gift Shop The 2009 Snowflake Bentley Pewter Ornament has been designed (see below) and modeled. Casting will begin in March and will be ready for sale at the end of April. Also in the Collection are our Scatter Pin, Necklace, Earrings and Zipper Pull using this beautiful Bentley snowflake design. NEW THIS YEAR! Vermont Snowflakes offering a Snowflake Bentley Charm Bracelet featuring five snowflake charms. Details on the Bracelet will follow when the new Collection is introduced. Editors note Bentley Birthday Bust by Wayne Howe Editors note by Peter Wolf Well, another year has past and Bentley's Birthday is tomorrow, February 7th (Recent discovery that his birthdate is the 7th, not the 9th, as previously believed) with a welcome snow replacing the rain we had most of January. One-hundred forty-three years ago Wilson Bentley was born on the Jericho farm where he lived his entire life. We continue our Jericho Center Weather conditions which are updated to a
web page every 15 minutes and historical weather data charts are also viewable. Bentley would record the weather conditions in a notebook throughout the day, each day, his whole life. Our current weather station records data automatically and I wonder if Bentley would rely on the new technology or the "old school" ways of manually recording the data?.
There is a Snowflake Celebration Feb 9th at The Community Center in Jericho Center celebrating Snowflake Bentley’s 143rd Birthday!! The celebration is at the Jericho Center Green - Saturday, February 9th, 2008, 9am-12pm.SCHEDULE OF EVENTS -9am Family Snowshoe Trek (BYO snowshoes), 9:30-11 Sled Dog Demo & Limited Rides for Children (Limited rides for 6-12 year olds with parental, 10-11 Crafts for Children, 10:00 Presentation by Elaine Salsbury -Snowflake Bentley’s Life, 10:30 Presentation by Stu Hall Photographing Snowflakes, 11:00 Community Snow Angel Flop, 11:30 Snowflake Bentley’s 143rd Birthday Celebration! Snowflake Bentley Look-a-Like Contest, Birthday Cupcakes, Fiddling, Sing-a-Long Sponsored by and Raffle to benefit The Community Center in Jericho For more information contact: Orelyn Emerson 899-3853 Ray Miglionico from Vermont Snowflakes recently acquired a photo of Bentley that we have never seen before and we present it for the first time here. We have an article by Duncan Blanchard "Jean Thompson in Jericho", and a fascinating article from Jon Nelson "Mr Bentley’s Electric Crystals". We also received some new information from Wayne Howe on the discovery of Bentley's actual birthdate. We still are getting a steady stream of requests for photos for publications ranging from news and magazine articles to textbooks and holiday cards from various companies. We are also looking for teaching materials on Bentley and snow, so please share your lesson plans/units with others through the message board or email us. As always, purchases at the Gift Shop and The Old Red Mill help preserve the legacy of Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley. Thanks to everyone who supported us this past holiday season!!! If you would like to contribute writings to this newsletter please Bentley Birthday Bust by Wayne Howe A careful reading of the town records have revealed that Wilson Bentley’s birthday is February 7th, rather than February 9th as recorded in books and biographies. Susan Merriam discovered the error when she read the original entriy with town clerk Jessica Alexander. “The date is clearly recorded as February 7th in beautiful script,” says Merriam, “someone else copied it incorrectly.” In Bentley’s time children were born at home and townspeople would come in to the Town Clerk’s the next time they were in the village. With so much written with the wrong information we expect February 9th will still be the commonly accepted birthdate, but you now know the real story, Bentley was born on February 7th. Jean Thompson in Jericho by Duncan C. Blanchard Jean Thompson wanted to learn all she could about frost and snow crystals, and there was no better teacher than Wilson Bentley. Jean, two years younger than Bentley, and a writer of children’s stories, first arrived in Jericho about 1904. She had married Henry Thompson in New York City in 1895, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1912. Jean and her husband had an income that let them enjoy life and to enter into the revelry of high society. She enjoyed beautiful clothes and the excitement of travel. They were friends of Charles Sanborn, the coffee man, and at times were guests on his yacht. Henry loved the good life and may have brought about the divorce by paying too much attention to other women at parties. They had no children and Jean never married again. In later years, Jean’s sister’s children joked that after the divorce she hated all males, even those only ten years old, for they had only one thing in mind. Jean arrived in Jericho near the beginning of a successful career as a writer. She had not published many articles, but in later years would write at least five books, many poems, children’s plays, and nearly one hundred magazine articles. Her income went up and down like a roller coaster, but she enjoyed a steady reputation as a children’s writer who told exciting stories about animals and the beauty that nature paints on her huge canvas of the atmosphere. Jean’s numerous articles on snow and frost were so well-known that she was called The Jack Frost Lady. While doing research for these articles she must have heard of Wilson Bentley. A desire to know more about snow crystals and frost brought her to Jericho and Bentley. For several summers she was a guest at Amy Nash’s boarding house on a side road that ran into the Nashville road barely half a mile west of Bentley’s house. It was a short walk between the two houses. Jean Thompson must have made the walk many times to visit Bentley and learn about frost, snow crystals, clouds, and nature’s other wonders of the atmosphere. The boarding house could not have been very large, for Amy Nash was also running a farm and taking care of her aging parents and her brother’s motherless children. Though Bentley’s mother was living at the time of Jean Thompson’s arrival, the sight of this smartly-dressed city woman going to visit Bentley must have set tongues awagging among the neighbors, some of whom had never traveled more than a dozen miles from Jericho. Bentley, after all, had long been and was now one of the few eligible bachelors in the eastern part of Jericho. Bentley lived in one side of a large farmhouse. His brother Charles and his wife and children lived on the other side. They too must have wondered about Wilson’s involvement with this woman. Was it really just to exchange ideas on the water wonders of the atmosphere? How many visits does it take to do that? Their children, sensing the questions in the minds of their parents, were well aware of the presence of Jean Thompson. Amy, one of Bentley’s nieces, remembering her said: “Oh yes. Yes. He used to talk with her and she’d come overt here and see him a whole lot. . . . And I‘ll tell you a little joke. He was always playing jokes on people on April Fool’s Day. So one time they fixed up a joke on him. They told him she was coming and that she would be in Essex Junction. He got all dressed up and went to Essex Junction and she wasn’t there. But you know, he wasn’t even mad about that. . . . Yes, he was quite interested in her.”
Ruth Nash, a niece who was brought up by Amy Nash, and about age twenty when Jean Thompson came to board with her aunt, had less charitable things to say about Jean: “She was quite a [man chaser]. . . . Lots of people flirt for the fun of it. My aunt was disgusted with her. My brother and I just felt that Willie was nice to her and he was nice to everyone. . . . Unless I size Willie up wrongly, he never would have brought a woman like her into his mother’s home. Willie did not flirt. He was one of the serious minded people. . . . Mrs. Thompson spent several summers at Aunt Amy’s and one winter visit. She probably is not of this world, but if she is, she will show up and try to horn in. So watch out. Her big interest used to be money, and I do not think she has changed any. . . . Aunt Amy heard plenty about Mrs. T., and she and grandmother did not like it. When she wrote the third year, there was no room for her. She tried to keep up the correspondence, but Aunt Amy did not answer. None of the Nash’s liked her. So I would just write her out of the picture.” Willie Bentley may indeed have been “one of the serious minded people.” But he clearly did not share the Nash’s opinions of Jean Thompson. On February 20, 1907, in the first of only three surviving letters of the many they exchanged, Bentley wrote: “Dear Mrs. Thompson, Yours, telling of the operation you underwent, & of your continued activities in a literary way, came duly to hand. I am glad to learn you are so well as to resume literary labors, altho [sic] doubtful of its wisdom just now, untill [sic] you give those eyes a good rest. I note with pleasure that Mrs. Stuart is to come for a stay with Amy Nash, & of course I shall go over and play for her if she cares to hear my amateurish melodies. Much has happened to me since writing you. On Feb 5 I secured the largest and most beautiful & valuable set of snow crystals that I ever secured from a single storm. Many odd rare ones, which I greatly prize. On the 15th I went to Burlington & heard Prof. Moore, Chief of the Weather Bureau, lecture on Meteorology. You can imagine my pleasure when he threw some of my snow crystals on the screen, & spoke so highly of them. His references to me and my work were very flattering indeed. He seems to be a very bright forceful man, & I was very glad to meet him. I presented him with a souvenir of Vermont, & of his visit, an album containing many of the choicer snow & frost forms secured this winter. He was greatly pleased and interested in it. Well, one lecture has come to me unsolicited, & I of course will deliver it, one on snow crystals, before the ”Social Club” of St. Albans, Vt. Kindly write me soon, that I may know how you are, & of your work. With
kind regards, Jean Thompson replied to Bentley’s letter about a month later, and on April 8 Bentley wrote again. In this letter, even more than in the first one, it is abundantly clear that he held none of the Nash’s devastatingly negative opinions toward her. Several parts of Bentley’s long letter have been eliminated. Dear Mrs. Thompson, Your letter, so full of good news, came to hand today, & gave me much pleasure, indeed. I am indeed enthusiastic over your prospects. They seem very bright, & I hope & trust no cloud will come to dim them. I am especially pleased at your prospects in regard to writing a new juvenile book. Hope you will succeed in securing contract for it, & will come & spend some of the beautiful summer days with us here in Nashville, while writing it. I am hammering away on the text of my own book, “Forms of Water,” and making some progress thereon. . . . I am much interested in your account regarding the book man and my autobiography. Hope I shall have the pleasure of returning the compliment sometime, & of giving some of those Encyclopedia fellows a sketch of yourself. But I have little hope, because they surely prefer to hunt you up yourself, & to hear from your own lips, & and through the medium of that charming voice of yours. I am also pleased & interested regarding those photographs for Magazine advertising purposes. It must be pleasing to you, & to whom would it not to sit for a photo to be used thus. I feel sure they will be good, & only wish one of them might be reproduced within the book “Water Wonders” so I might see it. . . . I am exceedingly sorry to learn that your eyes are no better. . . . When writing, you should print but little. I am awaiting with great pleasure, the arrival of your book, which you have so kindly promised me. Very Truly yours, W. A. Bentley
This letter is remarkable not only in revealing Bentley’s warm feelings toward Jean Thompson and the imminent publication of her book, but we learn for the first time about the writing of Bentley’s own book. He mentioned his book not only here and in his next letter to her but not in the rest of his surviving letters or in his published articles. What happened to this 1907 attempt at a book remains shrouded in mystery; it was never published and no manuscript has ever been found. Jean Thompson and Wilson Bentley clearly had a mutual admiration society going, for she had talked to publishers or agents about having Bentley write his autobiography, and he looked forward to returning “the compliment “ by writing about her, but was certain that others would rather hear it “through the medium of that charming voice of yours.” He hoped one of the pictures she sat for would appear in her book “so that I might see it.” This might have been a gentle hint to send her picture to him should it not appear in the book. Just over two weeks later, on April 26, Bentley received her book in the mail. Her picture was not in it. He read it and, later that day, sat down and penned the last of his surviving letters to Jean Thompson. Though he could not possibly have been aware of it, some of what he said in that letter suggested a reason why his own book was never published. His letter has been edited for brevity. Dear Mrs. Thompson, Your book “Water Wonders” which you so kindly sent me, came to hand today, & I had to sit down at once & read it through, & to feast my eyes upon the beautiful illustrations which it contains [Bentley’s own photographs!]. It is indeed a little beauty, & I am hoping that the number of copies sold will far exceed your utmost expectations, & bring you in handsome returns. You have added much and greatly improved the text, since I have seen the same, & this gave me an added pleasure while reading it. It contains some errors, as I suppose all books do, but you have done finely in writing up subjects unfamiliar to you, ie, of which you have not made special studies in, & have presented them in a charming way, & are to appeal & reach the understanding of the young, & the average unscientific reader. What a beautiful book it makes, . . . I can imagine now what a thing of beauty my own book will be when issued, & it makes me almost impatient that it must wait so many months, before coming from the press. Yet it will be the better for it, of that I am sure. . . . As I write, the snow is falling, & there is already 2 inches on the ground. Permit me in closing, to heartily congratulate you on the successful publication of your book. I can imagine what intense pleasure must have been yours, when the first copy was in your hands.
Very Truly yours, W. A. Bentley
Water Wonders, the “little beauty” so admired by Bentley, was Jean Thompson’s first book. Published by Doubleday as the eighth book in what presumably was a prestigious series on a variety of topics under the general title of “The Every Child Should Know Books,” Water Wonders was a 233-page account of the forms of water in the atmosphere and on the ground. She wrote extensively about dew, frost, snow crystals, and the formation of raindrops. Her eloquent and graceful prose was accompanied by no less than 154 photographs, all taken by Bentley. Not only were his photographs sprinkled liberally throughout her book, but so were his ideas, especially those on snow crystals and raindrops. Thompson’s book gave abundant testimony that the several summers she spent in Jericho learning from Bentley were not wasted. The master had taught his student well. Bentley had seen an earlier draft of the book but not the final one. One senses his disappointment at not seeing the final draft when, immediately after saying he had read and enjoyed the book, he writes that “it contains some errors.” But he does not dwell on this bit of mild, implied criticism and softens it somewhat by saying he supposes that all books contain some errors, especially if the authors, like herself, are writing about subjects of which they are unfamiliar. Bentley is correct in saying she had presented her ideas in a “charming way.” She came to Jericho and Bentley an accomplished and competent writer who was his equal at crafting eloquent prose that painted vivid word pictures with metaphor and simile. She wrote that “the snow crystal is most ethereal, born in the vast spaces of the heavens, fashioned by the changing clouds and vapors, its lullaby the hoarse crooning of the “mighty blizzard.” To her, thunder is “Heaven’s artillery,” and the retreating clouds from a thunderstorm “leaden, ominous curtains . . . swept aside.” Although published as a children’s book, it must have taken a highly precocious child to fully appreciate the ideas and beauty that covered its pages. Throughout the book Thompson used quotations from Shakespeare. Whittier, Lowell, and lesser known writers. Bentley observed correctly that it should appeal not only to young people but to the “average unscientific reader.” The book did well, and probably attracted readers of all ages. It was still in print ten years after its publication. Editors of Jean Thompson’s many magazine articles during that time were quick to remind readers that she was the author of Water Wonders. The success of her book is quite possibly the reason why Bentley’s was never published. For what publisher would be willing to gamble on another similar book, especially when Bentley had contributed most of his best photographs to Wonders and many of his ideas about the forms of water in the atmosphere. His book probably was doomed the first day Jean Thompson showed up in Jericho. After their summers of working together, can we conclude, as did Amy, her brothers and sisters, and possibly the Nash’s, that there may have been a romantic attachment between Bentley and Jean Thompson? Probably not. It seems unlikely. Clearly, they shared a passion in sensing the beauty of nature’s atmospheric wonders and wanting to share that with others, but that was it. Both in their early forties, they were far to set in ways that were worlds apart. He cared little for how he dressed, had no desire to travel far from Jericho, and lived only for the next winter’s treasures of the snow. But Jean Thompson liked to dress well, traveled extensively, and wanted to write about other things than the snow crystals. No one seems to know how much they interacted after the publication of Water Wonders, though there had to be some, because many of her magazine articles were illustrated with his photographs. In his photographic notebook, in February of 1916, Bentley included her name along with others in a list of people to whom he wanted to send reprints of his latest articles. Jean Thompson died many years after Bentley. Of the extensive correspondence that must have existed at the time of her death, little has survived. But among it were reprints of Bentley’s articles, several newspaper accounts of his death, and the three letters he sent her in 1907. Duncan C. Blanchard January 2008 See the Snowflakes at Sax by Wayne Howe The snowflakes that adorned Sax Fifth Avenue in New York City were stunning. The huge electric display of snowflakes, all based on Bentley’s photographs, creates a magical feeling on the street in the heart of mid-town Manhattan. A few pedestrians were so taken with the spectacle that they filmed it and put it on YouTube. You can view it at that site by entering Sax Fifth Avenue Snowflakes in the search window. Mr Bentley’s Electric Crystals by Jon Nelson Wilson A. Bentley was captivated by the beauty of snow crystals for most of his life. Perhaps then it should not be too surprising that he pondered the physical cause of their symmetry and intricacy. In doing so, he turned his mind to electricity. He considered that the crystalline surfaces had electric charges, with more charges concentrated at branch tips1. When the tips of the branches overflowed with charge, the charges dribbled down the sides to produce ‘growth nuclei’ for the sidebranches. This process, he argued, could explain the symmetry of snow crystals: "That the crystals, when permitted, attain to such a marvelous degree of symmetry and complicity, shows that the alignment of the
growth nuclei, presumably tiny electric charges, is symmetrically regular to an
almost unbelievable degree." Here he connects electricity to the formation of sidebranches and the branch symmetry. In other writings, he connects snow electricity to growth rate, and snow electricity to lightning. In the specifics he was wrong, but in general he was surprisingly prescient. Snow crystals are indeed electric crystals, and the electricity itself is captivating. To see why, consider some of the amazing things that Mr Bentley’s electric crystals can do. It has been known, at least since Benjamin Franklin's experiments, that lightning in clouds is an electrical discharge. As for the charging, in 1860, William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) suggested that the falling rain in the thundercloud was the charging current. However, Thomson did not specify how the drops got charged. For a long time, nobody even suspected ice as a player. But in 1904, Mr Bentley asserted that, one, much of the rain in thunderstorms is, in fact, melted snow, and two, the snow is the source of the electricity. Other suggested mechanisms came and went. Yet it wasn’t for another 75 years before experiments and observations made it clear that indeed the electricity in ice is the main source of cloud electricity. Although the details of Bentley’s idea are inconsistent with current knowledge of crystal growth and thunderstorms, we should still give him credit for nominating electric crystals as the key player in thunderstorm electricity. The current knowledge is this. When left by themselves, ice crystals apparently have negative charges on their surfaces and equal but opposite charges somewhere inside. As Bentley guessed, the amount of charge on the surface seems to increase when the crystals grow, with the greatest charging possibly being on the delicately branched crystals. When these crystals drift upward in a thundercloud, some of them ricochet off their larger, and blobbier, glazed-ice brethren, the hail particles. On average, they shed a little of this surface negative charge in the collision, leaving them with net positive charge and the hail with net negative charge. In each collision, about 10 to 100 thousand negative charges may be transferred. The large, negatively charged hail particles fall lower, and the small, positively charged ice crystals continue to drift upward until they can go no higher (about 6 miles above ground). Here, in the cloud’s upper reaches, a fist-sized volume of air may have tens of thousands of the crystals, so even if each crystal has only a little bit of excess charge, their cumulative charge can be huge. The ice collisions thus separate massive amounts of charge, putting negative charges near cloud bottom and positive charges near cloud top. This is analogous to rubbing a rubber balloon on your head: Each time a hair scrapes against rubber, the hair looses a little negative charge to the rubber. It may not be much, but the cumulative effect of many hairs and many rubs can transfer enough negative charge that, upon removing the balloon, you can hear the crackle of tiny sparks. In the thundercloud, it takes less than 30 minutes for these crystals to accumulate enough charge in the upper reaches for a spark to start. From the initial spark, one or more lightning bolts follow. Mr Bentley’s crystals can put on quite a show! So, think about these little crystals for a moment – not only do they dazzle us with their beauty when they fall as snow, not only do they shape the land when they stack up in glaciers, but they also create the largest sparks in the world, sparks that have temperatures higher than anywhere else on Earth. Not bad for a tiny flake of frozen water. Not bad at all. But that is not the only way the ice flakes show their electrical colors. The same charge exchange that happens with hail also happens whenever snow blows against something. In the windy plains, snow blowing against wire fences can deposit so much charge that the poor creature that gets too close to the fence may get knocked down by a spark2. Elsewhere, tent-bound persons in a night-time blizzard have been known to see an electrical glow appear when they place their hand near the tent wall. In this case, each snow crystal that hits the tent charges the fabric a little bit more. The fact that a diffuse glow occurs instead of a spark is likely due to the tent fabric being a poor electrical conductor. This means that the current to the hand is slower and occurs over a broader path – a glow instead of a spark. A similar thing happens when an airplane flies through an icy cloud. The electrical discharge in this case is called St. Elmo’s fire, and it occurs on the outside of the plane. And sometimes, we just hear snow’s electrical effects, as when snow blowing against antennas create radio static. These are just a few of the ways to experience Mr Bentley’s electrical crystal show.
In many materials, the charges are carried
by electrons. But the electrons in the H2O molecule are essentially
stuck, unable to leave the molecule. Nevertheless, the hydrogens, which stick
out like Mickey Mouse ears, have excess positive charge, whereas Mickey’s
‘chin’ has a corresponding excess of negative charge, as shown in (d). This +/–
asymmetry makes H2O a polar molecule. Now, there are two ways that
the polarity leads to a flow of electrical charge. Consider the charge flow as
a dance; the oxygen and hydrogen are the partners, and the partners have two
dance steps: the ‘hand-off’ and the ‘twist’. In the hand-off, a hydrogen from one molecule is “handed-off” to the next molecule. If both molecules were originally electrically neutral, as in (e) below, the resulting hand-off (green-black arrow) creates a negative charge (OH-) and a positive charge (H3O+). Subsequently, a hand-off to OH- (or from H3O+) effectively moves the charge through the ice. When two crystals collide, OH- on the surface move from one crystal to another. The reason for the abundance of OH- on the surface is still a mystery, but the twist is probably crucial. In the twist, a water molecule rotates,
effectively removing a hydrogen from one bond and transferring it to another.
In the first twist in (f) below, the Bernal-Fowler bond rule gets broken twice:
an ‘empty’ bond and a ‘double’ bond are created. In the second twist, the
double-bond moves. The empty and double bonds are viewed as two types of charges,
but personally, I have trouble viewing them this way. Instead, I think of the
charges as arising from a coordinated dance move: When a chain of molecules do
the twist, the end result is that the hydrogen positions have become a little more lined up. If we straighten out such a chain, as in (g) below, then the “+” in one Mickey-Mouse ear matches up with a “-” in a chin and the two cancel each
other out. Only the “+”s on top and the “–”s on the bottom remain. In reality,
the cancellations aren’t perfect, but the effect is the same: the “+”s on top
pull on the OH- In a way, the electricity inside snow crystals is just as captivating as their beauty outside. As we still do not know much about the electrical processes on the inside and the crystallization processes on the outside, the two may someday be found to be closely related, as Wilson Bentley first supposed. It is perhaps not too surprising that he thought about crystal electricity – at that time, electricity was portrayed as a kind of magical fluid. Magazine advertisements boldly asserted the wonders of electrical contraptions like J. Moses’s Electro-Galvanic Spectacles, Heidelberg’s Alternating Current Electric Belt, and the many strange-sounding electrical devices of Dr. Scott. They are all gone now, but we will always have Mr Bentley’s Electric Crystals. References
Bentley Makes New York Post by Wayne Howe The New York Post existed in Bentley’s time, so he might have gotten a kick out of a recent article in the paper’s Classroom Extra section. A third of a page is devoted to Bentley’s work, as part of a series meant for classroom use. Bentley, a staunch Republican, like almost all Vermonters of his time, might still recognize the masthead of the paper from his trips through the city during speaking tours later in his life. The article features a web link to snowflake Bentley and a science experiment kids can do. |
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Editors note -The Search for Jean Thompson by Duncan Blanchard -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Editors note by Peter Wolf Well, another year has past and Bentley's Birthday is tomorrow, February 9th with a cold north wind blowing snow across our region. One-hundred forty-two years ago Wilson Bentley was born on the Jericho farm where he lived his entire life. As we reported last year we added a weather station in Jericho Center, just a few hundred feet from Bentley's resting place. Our top wind of 49 mph on 10/28/06 was quite a house shaker! Weather conditions are updated to a web page every 15 minutes and historical weather data charts are also viewable. I think Bentley would appreciate the new teleologies, as he recorded the weather conditions in a notebook throughout the day, each day, his whole life. I can only imagine what Bentley would think of software like Photoshop and modern computers. We have an article by Duncan Blanchard on "The Search for Jean Thompson". We also are saddened by the passing of Blair Williams, a long time Jericho resident, Historical Society founders and Bentley educator. We get a glimpse into her life through the words of Wayne Howe, Former JHS President. The newest pewter snowflake collection from Vermont Snowflakes is in the final approval stages and we give you a sneak peak of the upcoming design. We still are getting a steady stream of requests for teaching materials on Bentley and snow, so please share your lesson plans/units with others through the message board or email us. A new Bentley Games and Puzzles CD-ROM has been recently released by Wolf Multimedia Studio of Jericho. Enjoy hours of fun with snowflakes even when it’s not snowing! This new CD-ROM includes six fun and informative snowflake games and puzzles including a match and a catch the flakes games, a series of jigsaw puzzles, a maze game, snowflake exploration and gem collecting with Snowflake Bentley. The new item is available at the Old Mill Craft Shop and our online gift shop at vermontsnowflakes.com We also have a new and interesting piece by Jon Nelson "Musings on Bentley’s ‘no two alike’". We all know this statement, but what is the origin? Jon reflects on that question and asks a few more! As always, purchases at the Gift Shop help preserve the legacy of Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley. Thanks to everyone who supported us this past holiday season!!! If you would like to contribute writings to this newsletter please The Search for Jean Thompson The writing of a biography requires the skills of a detective and the patience of a saint. The discovery of those who played a role in the life of Wilson Bentley was very time consuming. Clues that appeared to be leading me to some of the people were often misleading and the trail had to be abandoned. Occasionally I'd find a clue that led me quickly to someone who could tell me about their connection with Bentley. But other times trails that were extremely well-marked at the start, eventually narrowed and finally disappeared. Sometimes a trail that was found purely by serendipity appeared to lead to a dead end, but by looking ahead I could see off in the distance where it picked up again. Serendipity, sometimes defined as the art of profiting from unexpected occurrences, happened twice in my search for Jean Thompson and her interaction with Bentley. The first time occurred on a day in the mid 1950s at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, a few years after I had begun my career as an atmospheric scientist. A friend walked into my office with a small book in his hand., "Dunc," he said, "I've been going through some old books that I had as a child. I'm getting rid of most of them. This one is illustrated with many pictures of snowflakes. I know you're interested in snow and rain, so I thought you might like to have the book." "Sure, I'll take it," I replied. "What's one more book? I'll add it to my collection of books on weather. Many thanks." The book had been published by Doubleday in 1907, and it showed its age. The edges of the cover were dirty and frayed, and cracks appeared on the binding. The cover, once probably a deep sky blue, had faded to a pale blue. The title, in large silver letters at the top of the cover, was Water Wonders Every Child Should Know. Below that, perfectly positioned in the middle of the cover, was a large silver snowflake, and at the bottom was the author's name: Jean M. Thompson. I rapidly skimmed through the pages. Photographs of either clouds, dew, frost, raindrops, or snowflakes appeared on nearly every other page of this 230-page book. The page following the title page had this note: "I am greatly indebted to Mr. Wilson A. Bentley for valuable assistance in the arrangement of this book, and particularly for permission to reproduce the microphotographs." I recognized the name of Bentley, not so much for his photographs of snowflakes (we really should call them for what they are, snow crystals) but for his elegant measurements of raindrop size made by letting the drops fall into a pan of flour, where they would harden to form dough pellets about the same size as the raindrops. I was working on a project in which we were trying to understand how rain formed so easily in sub-tropical clouds. Bentley's flour-pellet method was one of several ways we used to measure drop size. But his photographs of snow crystals in Thompson's book had little interest for me. I put the book on my bookshelf where it laid untouched to gather dust for nearly fifteen years. In 1968 I began to think again about Bentley. Meanwhile, I had learned more about the elegant photographs he took of snow crystals at his farmhouse in Jericho, Vermont. But what was it that so motivated him to do this work year after year? Where could I learn about this? I remembered Jean Thompson's book and wondered if she could tell me about her interaction with him. If still living, I guessed she would be at least ninety years old. I wrote to Doubleday to get her address. An editor there replied that Jean Thompson had died many years ago, but for a long time Doubleday had sent royalties on her several books to her sister, Mary Dudley Smith, in Yonkers, New York. The editor gave me her address. I wasted no time in sending her a letter. The stage was now set for the second occurrence of serendipity. A month passed, then a letter arrived from Yonkers, but it was not from Mary Dudley Smith. It was from Elizabeth Sansalone, who lived at a different address from the one where I had sent my letter. In part, she wrote: "Mary Dudley Smith was my grandmother and she died 14 years ago. Since that time two other families have lived at 156 Roberts Lane. Yonkers is a city of more than 200,000 residents so there is not a small-town feeling here at all. It was only through a civic organization that the present resident and I recently became acquainted." Incredible! Imagine how the odds had been stacked against me. It was only by a chance meeting of two strangers at a civic organization that got me in contact with Elizabeth Sansalone, whose great aunt was Jean Thompson. At that meeting Elizabeth told the resident of her grandmother's house that Mary Dudley Smith had once lived there. The resident remembered the name, so when my letter arrived it was forwarded to Elizabeth. But what if my letter had arrived before Elizabeth met the occupant of what was once her grandmother's house? It would have been returned to me, and that would have been the end of the trail in my search for Jean Thompson. And what if my letter had arrived more than a month or two after the chance meeting? It's likely the occupant of the house would have forgotten the name of Elizabeth's grandmother and again returned the letter to me. In all the many years that I could have sent the letter to the Yonkers address, it was only during that narrow window of time of a couple months in 1968 that the fates decreed that I would get in touch with Elizabeth Sansalone who would tell me about Jean Thompson. Elizabeth was very helpful. She told me what the family thought about Jean, her marriage and divorce, the many books and articles she wrote, her love of travel and beautiful clothes, and how Jean, when she met Bentley, was at the beginning of a successful career as a writer for children. But best of all, Elizabeth sent me photographs of Jean and three long letters that Bentley had written to her. The letters revealed a lot, not only about Jean Thompson but about Bentley's relationship with her. In 1968 I left the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to join the scientific staff of the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center of the State University of New York in Albany. I developed new research interests, did some teaching, and worked with graduate students on their thesis research. I had long planned to write a biography of Bentley, but never seemed to find the time to do the massive amount of research that was necessary before putting words on paper. But over the next few years I published three articles about various aspects of Bentley's work. It wasn't until the early 1990s, after I had retired, that I began to work fulltime on Bentley's biography. My book The Snowflake Man was published in 1998. In the book I wrote extensively about Jean Thompson and her interaction with Wilson Bentley, using not only material supplied by Elizabeth Sansalone but with stories told to me by the late Ruth Amy Nash, who was in Jericho when Jean Thompson first showed up around 1904 or 1905. Miss Nash did not think very highly of Jean Thompson! In my essay in the next newsletter, I will write about Jean Thompson's visits to Jericho and her stormy interaction with some of Bentley's neighbors. Duncan C. Blanchard BLAIR WILLIAMS by Wayne Howe
Blair, of course, was not alone in her efforts. Myrna Lindholm, Neil Smith, Willie Corcoran, Gary Irish, Wayne Alexander and many, many others began the society and worked to purchase the Mill. Over the years they secured milling equipment, created the craft shop, began the archive, showcased Bentley's work and created a gathering place for local history. We are grateful for their efforts. Others worked, but Blair provided vision and elbow grease. As anyone who has had the pleasure (or pain) of being part of the society, those who do have the biggest vote. Needless to say, Blair had a big vote for a long, long, long time. She had qualities of other ambitious women. The pioneering spirit of back to the lander Helen Nearing, who like Blair, left the wilderness of the city to build a new life in Vermont- stone by stone. Her home is a testament to her physical and mental stamina. She had the fiery tenacity of 20th century sculptor Louise Nevelson, who frenetically created monumental works using found wooden objects. Blair was constantly in motion, rolling up her sleeves and getting things done. There is evidence of her efforts everywhere: the Mill House, where she yanked out the fence and planted the cedar hedge, the Archives, where she contributed some of the first items in the collection, the Bentley Gallery, where she was an early champion of this remarkable man, and in the Craft Shop, where she worked with Willie to generate income for the society and showcase local crafts. She pursued everyone and anything for assistance with verve, signing people up for work or contacting Senator Aiken or McGeorge Bundy for money. Her efforts have resulted in a monumental work… of local proportions. In addition to leading the restoration of the mill, she told the story of Wilson Bentley. Her efforts in the early seventies at Mount Mansfield High School brought his legacy to the present era. Blair's formal and informal presentations over the years kept the local kids interested, until children's books, high quality prints and television shows took the lead. This gathering could have taken place in the mill, since her spirit is so easily felt there. We would all gather in the cavernous second floor room. We'd hear the Brown's River rushing below us, and watch the white pines rocking in the strong winds. Inside the room, plain as it is, Blair saw something many of us could not see: a vision of a building that could tell the story of our community: two centuries of people living ordinary and extraordinary lives. That vision has been largely realized. There is a plaque at St. Paul's in London, built by Christopher Wren. It says, "If you seek a monument to me look around." That is no less true of Blair and the Mill. Those of us who visit the mill, the gallery, the archive, the craft shop, and the park are beneficiaries of a life's work that is visible and cohesive. For this the Jericho Historical Society and its neighbors give thanks for the life of Blair Williams.
Musings on Bentley’s ‘no two alike’ by Jon Nelson Bentley is famous for his phrase ’no two alike’, but what did he really mean by it? Excerpts in Duncan Blanchard’s book suggest that Bentley was usually referring to only the crystals he photographed1. Sometimes though, Bentley seems to be referring to all snow crystals. Maybe sometimes he meant it one way and sometimes the other; however, I wonder if he also had a third, and more profound, meaning in mind, a meaning suggested in his passage 2: The deeper one enters into the study of Nature, the If Nature becomes ‘broader and grander’ the deeper one looks, as he so eloquently stated, then of course every snow crystal will be unique; indeed, so too will everything else in Nature. In this meaning, ‘no two alike’ is a very condensed way of saying that Nature will always show you something new. Bentley arrived at this opinion by observing various forms of water, but he applies the idea to all of Nature. This third meaning of ‘no two alike’ reminds me of Kamo no Chomei’s opening line of his early 13th century classic of Japanese literature 3: “The river flows on unceasingly, yet the water is never the same.” Both phrases, Chomei’s and Bentley’s ‘no two alike’, can be interpreted 4 as meaning that the closer one views Nature, the more details one sees. Regardless of Bentley’s intended meaning, I prefer to think that he had this deeper interpretation in mind. As to why, in 1901, Bentley first chose his now-popular words ‘no two alike’ instead of other phrases, like ‘all are unique’, ‘every one different’, ‘no two the same’, or some other variation, we may never know, but it is curious that George E. Ohr (1857-1918), the self-proclaimed “mad potter of Biloxi” often used the same phrase to describe his unique pottery. I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that Bentley was aware of Ohr’s phrase; indeed, it has been said that until recently nobody outside of Biloxi had heard of the mad potter either, so it may be that the phrase had been in some popular work before Ohr and Bentley used it. If a reader can find a reference to ‘no two alike’ that predates Bentley, please let me know, for example by posting it on the Bentley message board. Compared to the other variations, the phrase Bentley chose has a certain poetic simplicity, and for all we know, he created it himself. I also wonder why people often ask “Is it true that no two snowflakes are alike?” As far as I know, this ‘no two alike’ question is asked only of snow and not other nice things to look at, like roses, leaves, or pebbles. Part of the reason is that Bentley applied the phrase only to snow. But is there something special about snow that makes it the sole target of the question? The answer may be ‘yes’; for with snow, we have just a bunch of H2O molecules locked together, plain old water turned solid, and yet the designs on the crystal have both an elaborate detail that is easy to see and an obvious symmetry that makes the pattern relatively quick to grasp. Other symmetric objects are usually simple, like ball bearings, diamonds, and starfish. However, a snow crystal, in addition to its relatively uncommon six-fold symmetry (i.e., the same when rotated by 1/6 of a turn) and its mirror symmetry about each corner, contains a surprising intricacy and detail. When one sees a snow crystal for the first time, and sees all the fine lines and branches, one may naturally wonder if all crystals are somehow destined to look that way. Then one sees another crystal and notices right away that it is different but just as elaborate, and after seeing more crystals one is surprised that something as plain and pure as water can produce so much variety. Roses, leaves, and pebbles, in contrast, seem to lack one or more of these qualities of snow. We could examine each case in turn and try to determine exactly why we don’t ask the question of roses, leaves, or pebbles, but I think it all boils down to the fact that only the snow crystal has this element of surprise. Finally, is there an answer to the question? Maybe, but the answer will depend on how the words ‘snowflake’ and ‘alike’ are defined. And even when these words are precisely defined, the answer may only be a probability based on some dubious assumptions. I say dubious because we still have only a very poor understanding of how snow crystals grow under ideal laboratory conditions, never mind the actual conditions in a cloud, of which, incidentally, we also have very little knowledge. Despite these limitations, we can still have fun trying to answer the question. Some of this is discussed in the Bentley message forum, and more will probably be added soon. However, I think the more interesting question is the following: Why do snow crystals have so much obvious variety? This question is answerable. From what we now know, the best answer is that Nature has made the growth of the snow crystal to be extraordinarily sensitive to temperature and has made the clouds to have ever-changing temperatures. Or, to paraphrase Chomei, “The clouds churn on unceasingly, yet the crystal-laden air is never the same.” References
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Editors note Well, another year has past and Bentley's Birthday is tommorow, February 9th with nary a flake on the ground. One-hundred forty-six years ago Wilson Bentley was born on the Jericho farm where he lived his entire life. We recently added a new weather station in Jericho Center, just a few hundred feet from Bentley's resting place. Weather conditions are updated to a web page every 15 minutes and historical weather data charts are also viewable. I think Bentley would appreciate the information, as he recorded the weather conditions in a notebook throughout the day, each day, his whole life. We have an article by Duncan Blanchard on Bentley's Montages. We also have a new contributor, Jon Nelson, who has been a researcher of ice crystals in clouds for about 15 years, when he started his doctoral research around 1990-1991. Over the past six years, his research has been more of a part-time effort, and we welcome his contributions to the newsletter and the message board. Jon has been answering questions on snow crystals on the message board, so if you have any questions don't be afraid to ask. The newest pewter snowflake collection from Vermont Snowflakes is in the final approval stages and we give you a sneak peak of the upcoming design. Wilson Bentley’s photographs are featured in stunning fashion on a shopping bag made exclusively for the high end retailer, Sax’s Fifth Avenue in New York City. This is the second year that Bentley has graced urban shoppers in New York City with his ice gems. A recent book, Exuberance by author Kay Jamison, Includes a long story on "Snowflake" Bentley . Duncan Blanchard helped her with information about Bentley. It's a fine book in which she writes about many people who, like Bentley, showed exuberance in their work. We want to thank Sean Kelly and The Samples (thesamples.com) for usage of a few of their songs on the 2005 Bentley DVD, and especially for their tribute in a recent Burlington show to “Snowflake” Bentley, Thanks Sean. We still are getting a steady stream of requests for teaching materials on Bentley and snow, so please share your lesson plans/units with others through the message board or email us.
As always, purchases at the Gift Shop help preserve the legacy of Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley. Thanks to everyone who supported us this past holiday season!!! If you would like to contribute writings to this newsletter please
Bentley’s Snow Crystal Montages by Duncan Blanchard
The opening of the Pan-American Exposition in 1901 in Buffalo, New York, allowed thousands of visitors to see a sensitive artistic side of Bentley’s talents. The Exposition, the most important ever to be held in the United States up to that time, had a midway, numerous illuminated fountains, and hundreds of exhibits, both from the United States and other countries, that touched on religious, philosophical, musical, artistic, and scientific themes. It is not known with any certainty how Bentley happened to exhibit there or how much of his work was used. But it is likely he was asked to do so by the Weather Bureau. A year before, when the Bureau was making plans for their displays in the Exposition, a memo from one Bureau administrator to another said that Bentley’s photographs of snow crystals “if enlarged could possibly be suitable for exposition purposes.” Undoubtedly the large photographs were on exhibit. Their beauty must have been appreciated by all those whose eyes fell upon them, but most of the admiration had to be reserved for a single work of art.
The montage had a certain abstract quality to it. Most people looking at it probably saw first a simple six-pointed star, each of whose arms was made from five of the largest snow crystals in the montage. To keep the six-fold symmetry, Bentley placed a single crystal at the very center to be shared with each of the six arms. Superimposed on all of this, and composed of slightly smaller crystals, was a Star of David, two equilateral triangles interlaced one with the other. The six points of the Star were placed not upon but between the points of the simple star, whose six arms moved radially outward from the center. By using smaller crystals for the Star of David, Bentley achieved a three-dimensional aspect to his creation; it appeared to be set back from the simple star.
But that was not all. Toward the center of the montage, he placed thirty-six very small crystals in the form of smaller Star of David that showed only the six points. Within this, but now using much smaller crystals that showed up mainly as tiny dots, were two more modified Stars of David, interlaced but still surrounding the crystal at the very center. The decreasing size of the crystals that made up the interior stars gave a further three-dimensional aspect to the montage, making it appear as though the center crystal sat in some special position at the end of a long tunnel that receded far into the background. Looking at the montage as a whole, the eye moved back and forth unconsciously between the two types of stars, first seeing one, then the other, then both together. The six-pointed star in the foreground gave the viewer the feeling that the montage primarily depicted those stellar snow crystals so often associated with the snowflakes, but if one focused on the bold hexagonal outlines that both stars together made, the montage appeared to be that of a hexagonal plate, the most popular of the snow crystals in the public eye after the stellar. As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is the type of snow crystal that could be seen in this splendid work of art. But perhaps Bentley had that in mind when he created it.
Curiously, after the Exposition, Bentley never again used the montage. Since he was so enchanted with the beauty of the snow crystals, I would have expected him to use it in some of the many articles he would later publish, but he never did. He did, however, make a lantern slide of it, and a large photograph of the montage was found in the farmhouse after his death. Surprisingly, Bentley had made a similar montage many years before the Exposition, possibly as a teenager. One of his nieces told me it was made “just from sketches he’d made of snowflakes that he’d examined under the microscope. That’s when he was around fifteen, sixteen years old.” She went on to say that her uncle had it framed and hung on the wall, but one day it fell and the glass broke. She said “uncle didn’t take care of things . . . it was long before he died that the [montage] had been thrown out.”
Though Bentley was not outwardly religious, he made several elegant montages of the cross to present to friends and family. The vertical portion was made of six or seven large snow crystals, all different, while the horizontal section was composed of two crystals on each side of the vertical portion. In between and to the side of each of the crystals were two much smaller ones.
Not to be outdone by Bentley, in 1963 a committee of the citizens of Jericho made a snow crystal montage on a ten-inch diameter dinner plate to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jericho. A large (five inch diameter) snow crystal on a blue background decorated the center of the plate. Around this was a white ring that separated the center background from a blue ring about an inch and a half in thickness that ran around the edge of the plate. On this blue ring, evenly spaced, were sixteen smaller snow crystals, and between them were even smaller crystals of varying size. The blue ring had a speckled appearance that made it look as if the snow crystals were falling among hundreds of other snow crystals, many of them far in the distance.
For many years this plate could be bought at the Old Red Mill gift shop in Jericho. Were Bentley still with us, I suspect he would approve of this montage and buy many of these plates to give to his friends. Snowflakes Grace Sax Fifth Avenue by Wayne Howe
Wilson Bentley’s photographs are featured in stunning fashion on a shopping bag made for the high end retailer Sax’s Fifth Avenue. The store offers merchandise to a market similar to the offered at downtown Filenes’s store in New England cities. Sax is know for, among other things, for it’s famous Christmas windows near Rockefeller Center in Manhattan.
Twenty of Bentley’s snowflakes are set off against a matte black finish on each side of the shopping bag. Around the inner rim of the bag are words of the season including: Believe, Grace, Hope, Mercy, Glory and Harmony. Inside the bag is a scarlet red. A Bentley quote is imprinted for the curious shopper. The quote reads, “Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were a miracle of beauty, and it 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 design was gone, without leaving any record behind.” Wilson Snowflake Bentley, photographer, 1925. The snowflakes have also appeared in print ads for the store in area publications such as the New York Times. Sax Fifth Avenue provided a generous honorarium to the Jericho Historical Society for use of the snowflakes. One can imagine a bustling sophicate marshalling through their shopping in mid town Manhattan with a Bentley bag filled with presents. What grin would have stolen across the face of the good humored farmhand photographer.
The Snowflake’s Closest of Kin by Jon Nelson Wilson Bentley is well known to readers here for his photomicrographs of snow crystals. Snow, however, was only one of the many ‘water wonders’ that held his fascination1. Some of these wonders were made of liquid water, such as dew, and some were frozen water (ice), like the snow crystal. The frozen type he called “The snowflake’s closest of kin”, and they included hoarfrost, rime, windowpane frost, and ice flowers2. To obtain photographs of any of them with the quality obtained by Bentley is difficult even now, which is yet another reason to admire Bentley’s skill and perseverance. On the inside, the
snowflake’s ‘kin’ all have the same crystal structure. But they appear
different on the outside, largely due to the different ways the water in the
surroundings gets to the ice surface. There are many distinct kin because the
surrounding water can be in various states (i.e., ice, liquid, and vapor) and
there are many ways that each state of water can get to the ice surface. I’ll
focus here on snow crystals, hoarfrost, rime, windowpane frost, and ice
flowers. These forms are commonly seen by many of us, and have been observed by
people for a very long time. So it is easy to think, as I probably once did, that
they are well understood by science.
But this view is quite mistaken. Yes, we know they all consist of H2O
molecules and we know something about the structure of ice, but how exactly
they form contain many mysteries. I’ll
describe briefly what Bentley thought of them, and what I think is known and
not known about them.
Snow crystals These were the first ice forms that Bentley studied, and they always fascinated him the most. Snow forms in the atmosphere, either directly on a microscopic dust particle or on a frozen droplet, and grows by the bombardment of water molecules from the water vapor in the air. This growth mode is called growth from the vapor. However, this ideal snow form is often ruined by two other growth modes. When many snow crystals strike each other and stick together, the result is a snowflake (growth by aggregation). When cloud droplets strike a falling snow crystal, the nice crystalline pattern gets covered up, eventually turning the snow into a white blob called graupel (growth by riming). So, if you have tried examining snow crystals yourself, you have probably found, as I have, that most snow looks much different from those in Bentley’s photomicrographs. One often finds snowflakes, partly melted snowflakes, graupel, or tiny pieces of ice that are hard to identify without a microscope. Sometimes though, the conditions are ideal for producing beautiful crystals. If you are lucky enough to experience such a snowfall, then you will understand Bentley’s devotion to snow crystals and why he said “Every crystal was a masterpiece of design; and no one design was ever repeated.”3 Meteorologists classify these ‘designs’ into 80 types. However, most of these are one of two
basic forms; the tabular form, in which growth is fastest on the six “corners”
of the ice structure (Bentley’s book2 contains mostly this form),
and the columnar form, in which growth is fastest on the top and bottom. In addition to these forms, there are also
hybrid types that contain both tabular and columnar parts and irregular types
such as the seagull type. The biggest unsolved mystery of snow is to determine
why the tabular form occurs at some temperatures and the columnar form occurs
at other temperatures.
Hoarfrost Hoarfrost refers to the mass of white, hair-like pieces of ice that grow outward from cold objects in cold air. (The word ‘hoar’ is an old term meaning white- or gray-haired.) One can see hoarfrost on blades of grass and leaves after a cold night (pictures below). Hoarfrost is very closely related to snow because it also grows from the vapor. The only substantial difference between hoarfrost and snow is that hoarfrost has grown on some solid object such as grass and leaves. Also, like snow, hoarfrost comes in two basic forms: columnar, which are needle-shaped, and tabular, which have a flat, hexagonal, plate-like shape. The needles form in relatively warm temperatures (yet still sub-freezing), whereas the plates form at lower temperatures. As with the snow crystal, the reason why one temperature results in columnar forms whereas another temperature results in tabular forms is largely unknown. Hoarfrost crystals are also known toexperience some as-yet-unknown type of electrical charging. In this sense,
Bentley was right when he wrote “…and there is a play of tiny electric charges
about and upon [the snow crystals]…”4 Some scientists now think that
the electrical charging of growing hoarfrost is closely related to electrical
charging of snow crystals, which appears to be important for the charging of
thunderstorms. However, the electrical nature of frost and snow remains a
research topic with many mysteries.
Rime At a distance, rime looks like hoarfrost, but closer inspection often reveals that its ‘hairs’ are thicker and sometimes packed tightly together into a comb-like structure. Rime forms on an object when the object is exposed to a droplet cloud or fog that is below freezing (32 °F or 0 °C). Thus, the ice grows mainly by the bombardment of small droplets of “supercooled” liquid water, which freeze into ice as soon as they contact the rime. The reader may be surprised to hear that the droplets are below 32 °F, but such supercooled droplets are the norm in clouds above –40 °F, not the exception. Bentley thought that supercooling was due to electrical charges in the water. Although water does indeed have electrical charges, as anybody who has touched an electric fence with a wet stick can attest, but we now know that supercooling is due to the strong surface forces on ultra-microscopic pieces of ice in the liquid that suppress their growth. As clouds of droplets are relatively common on mountains, rime is often seen on ice-cold mountains. When the drops are large and the temperature just barely below freezing the rime becomes smooth and clear. This is called glaze. (See pictures of rime and glaze below.) Cloud scientists would like to know how thestructure (density, bumpiness) of rime depends on the temperature of the air,
the wind speed, and the number and size of the droplets. But these things are
poorly known. Moreover, the exact ways that the droplets freeze upon impact are
largely unknown. Another complication is that vapor growth also occurs on rime.
If we could understand the rime structure, we might gain a better understanding
of thunderstorms as well. This is because rime also forms on snow crystals as
they tumble about in a thunderstorm, causing the crystals to become graupel
particles, which, like snow, are crucial for thunderstorm charging. We know
that when a snow crystal rebounds off a graupel particle, some electrical
charge is passed from one to the other. This charging ultimately produces
lightning, but exactly how it works remains a secret of nature. Ice flowers According to Bentley, there are several forms of ice with the name ‘ice flowers’. In his book he describes two such flower-like forms5. One type is now called “Tyndall flowers”, named after the Irish physicist-naturalist John Tyndall who first described them. These flowers, pictured below, form when light from the sun, or a bright lamp in a laboratory, is absorbed in the ice, thus melting a little bit of ice within a larger slab of ice. Now ice has the somewhat uncommon property that it floats on its own melt; that is, ice is less dense than liquid water, or, to put it another way, a given weight of liquid water takes up less space than the same weight of ice. Therefore, when the light melts a little ice within the larger piece of ice, a little bit of space is left over that is filled with water vapor. In this way, a Tyndall flower is born. As more ice melts, the vapor-filled region expands outward like a six-petaled flower. Surprisingly, their growth form indicates that some ice inside has been heated slightly above freezing; that is, it is superheated ice! Curiously, this form has seen very little study. In some ways, the Tyndall flower is like a “negative version” of the other type of ice flower: the “ice flower on water”, to use Bentley’s term.
Bentley carefully studied and classifiedthe types of windowpane frost, perhaps more than any other scientist then or now. And yet, as far as I know, the reasons why windowpane frost has such variety are still not known; indeed, the way that the ice forms and grows on windowpanes is poorly known. However, we do know that glass surfaces generally have a very thin layer of liquid water on them. The curving type of pattern is thought to be due to the freezing of this liquid, which is somewhat, but not exactly, like the freezing of a puddle. You can understand this by noticing that all the frost images below differ from the puddle crystal image above. In some cases, growth of windowpane frostis partly from the vapor, just like the growth of hoarfrost and snow crystals, except the ice remains in a thin layer against the window. This brings up an interesting story6 about Wilson Bentley. What happened was this. Bentley observed a clear region of glass between a frost crystal and the surrounding deposit of tiny dew-drops. (You can easily see this for yourself by using your breath to “fog” the glass around a solitary frost crystal on the outside of a car window after a cold night. Also, see the frost image below, bottom right.) He correctly realized that this was a “most singular, and doubtless most important, phenomenon” and supposed that a similar phenomenon occurred in clouds. But, alas, Bentley did not realize the cause. It is thought that this clear region is due to the rapid evaporation of the dew droplets near the frost, which, in turn, happens because the air around the frost has dried out due to the growth of the frost. As Bentley supposed, the same process occurs in clouds. Indeed it is very important for it results in the rapid growth of snow crystals, which ultimately melt into the large raindrops we receive in the warmer months. Although he did not completely explain the mechanism for the growth of large raindrops, his observational studies of raindrops were important and far ahead of their time. Closing thoughts Bentley focused his attention on snow crystals because of their beauty and variety. The snowflake kin also have beauty and variety, particularly the windowpane frost.7 Much has been learned about snowflakes and their kin since Bentley’s time, and yet we can still look at them and realize that we are in fact peering into a world that remains largely unknown.8 Notes. 1. “Photographing Water Wonders” by Wilson A. Bentley, The American Annual of Photography, vol. 24, pp 84-86, 1910. 2. “Snow Crystals” by W. A. Bentley and W. J. Humphreys, Dover Publications, NY, NY, 1962. 3. “The Snowflake Man, A Biography of Wilson A. Bentley” by Duncan C. Blanchard, The McDonald & Woodward Publishing Company, Blacksburg, Virginia, 1998. Page 22. 4. Ibid, page 153. 5. See introduction to the book in Note 2. 6. See “A Discovery Not Made” on pages 133-141 of the book in Note 3. 7. There are many other ice forms. The relatively common types include the various patterns in the freezing of lakes and puddles, icicles, ice stalagmites, and ground needles (pipkrake), which all grow from the liquid. A less common type, yet quite astonishing in form, is the ‘sap crystal’, which forms from the freezing of plant sap. 8. Thanks to Tsuneya Takahashi, Peter Wolf, Judy Mosby, Michael Sherback, Tadanori Sei, and Charles Knight for the photo images, and to Duncan Blanchard for suggesting changes to an earlier version of this article.
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Editors note top of page
Editors note This past October and November were quite the astronomical show months in Jericho, on October 30th we were treated to a spectacular aurora borealis (the northern lights) display. The night sky lit up early (around 7:00 pm) with deep blood red colors to the north and slight greenish to the south. The light seemed to emanate from the zenith and radiate out in bands of red and green. There was not the usual "shimmering" of light and colors that usually occur, but rather a slow shifting of colors. On November 9th we were fortunate to have perfect weather for a total lunar eclipse. Although a bit cold around 25 degrees, the clear skies made for a great viewing for over 3 hours. What do these things have to do with the "Snowflake Man" you might ask? Well, Wilson Bentley also was a great observer of the night sky as well as his other attributes, he observed 634 auroras over 49 years of his life and recorded information on each. We are pleased to include an article by Duncan Blanchard on "Wilson Bentley's Auroral Observations", a fascinating account of Bentley's research. We also include a piece by Wayne Howe (former JHS Pres.), about Bentley the farmer. Check out the new items at the Old Red Mill Craft Shop on Rt. 15 in Jericho where the Bentley museum is also located. Ray Miglionico of Vermont Snowflakes fills us in on the new items available at the shop and online.
Wilson
Bentley's Auroral Observations On September 19, 1920, Wilson Bentley sat down at a table in his farmhouse in the Nashville section of Jericho, Vermont, and penned a letter to Dr. Charles Brooks, an eminent meteorologist of that era. He revealed in this letter yet another scientific interest that had tested his powers of observation since he was eighteen years old, but, curiously, had never been mentioned in any of his articles. His letter began:
When Bentley wrote this letter he was fairly well-known, not only to his Jericho neighbors but to thousands of people throughout the country, as the Snowflake Man. Since that memorable day of January 15, 1885, when he was still only 19 and had succeeded in obtaining the world's first photomicrographs of snow crystals, Bentley had persevered year after year in his photographic quest for the most exquisite snow crystals that fell from the winter skies. Over the years he wrote many articles on snow crystals, frost, raindrops, and dew, but curiously not a one on his auroral sightings. The aurora, technically the aurora borealis in the Northern Hemisphere, but often simply called the northern lights, is caused when particles emitted from the sun end their long journey by crashing into the earth's upper atmosphere and producing an ionized gas. The particles come from or near sunspots, the dark spots that can be seen on the surface of the sun. The number of spots seen at any given time vary year by year, and when plotted on a graph show a wave-like, up-and-down pattern. The lowest number of sunspots occur, on average, about every 11 years. Accordingly, one might expect that the frequency of occurrence of auroras over the years should also show a wavelike pattern that follows or correlates with that of the sunspots. Long ago, scientists found just such a correlation. It is astonishing that Bentley did not notice that the number of auroras he observed each year showed a wavelike pattern with a minimum about every 11 years. It certainly was not because of a lack of data. There are few people in the annals of aurora observations who peered into the night sky for those tell-tale flashes of color for as many years as Bentley did. He made his first recorded observation on 1 February, 1883, one week before his 18th birthday. He wrote that the aurora was "faint." His last observation was made almost half a century later, 49 years to be exact. It occurred on November 26, 1931, and he recorded it with no comment. About that time, or perhaps a week later, he became sick. He died of pneumonia on December 23, 1931. The record of aurora sightings that Bentley sent to Dr. Brooks listed each sighting by the day of the year and with a comment about its intensity and appearance. He observed 398 auroras from 1883 through September 1920! Examination of his weather logbook, in which he recorded weather observations morning, noon, and night, every day of the year, reveal he had seen an additional 236 auroras in the 1920s before his death. This gives a grand total of 634 auroras seen over 49 years, an average of about 13 every year. What a feat of observation! Few of us can lay claim to even one auroral sighting a year. One of the first things I did upon receiving a copy of Bentley's auroral sightings (the original copy resides in the library of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) was to make a simple graph of the number of auroras he saw each year as a function of the year. As expected, a beautiful wavelike, up-and-down curve appeared on the graph paper. It followed approximately the ups and downs of the sunspot cycle with minimums about every 11 years. The largest number of auroras seen by Bentley was 34 in 1883 and 31 in 1930. The smallest number was zero in 1901, one in 1902, and again, about 11 years later, zero for both years of 1913 and 1914. We are left with a puzzling question. Why did Bentley, whose interest in atmospheric phenomena knew no bounds, not do anything with his magnificent 49-year-long series of auroral observations? One can only guess at an answer. Though he was fairly well-known at the time he wrote to Dr. Brooks, real and enduring fame was to burst upon him just a week later when the first major newspaper article about his snow crystal photography appeared in the New York Tribune, followed by another article a few weeks later in the Boston Herald. From that time until his death Bentley was the subject of numerous articles in newspapers and magazines. It is possible that in September, 1920, Bentley, aware of the forthcoming newspaper articles, knew he would have many letters to answer and numerous requests for snow crystal photographs to fill. Perhaps he knew he would never get around to work on the auroral data, so decided to send it to Dr. Brooks with the hope that it would be "...of some real value to students of auroral phenomena." On the other hand, perhaps Bentley did discover in later years the 11-year cycle in his auroral data. We'll probably never know, for the vast collection of letters and other materials found in the farmhouse after his death were burned. Fortunately, however, the several notebooks in which he recorded data on his snow crystal and other photography, along with nearly twelve thousand photographic glass plate negatives (and positives) of his snow crystals, were saved and eventually sent to the Buffalo Museum of Science, where they are today. Observations of the multi-colored and ever-changing streamers in the aurora clearly were of interest to Bentley, but his passion and life's work was with the snow crystals. In this he never faltered and returned to it winter after winter. He said that although "...the beauty of the snow crystals is evanescent, like the beauties of the autumn, as of the evening sky, it fades but to come again."
BENTLEY
MADE HAY WHILE THE SUN SHINES Wilson Bentley’s pictures catalogued the many forms of snow, but they also depicted life in rural Vermont at the turn of the century. His photos include leisure activities and work, hard work on the homestead. Through them we get a sense of the agricultural practices of his time. Remember, Bentley had to pull his weight on the farm if he was to indulge in his fabulous obsession with photomicrography. Haying was a tremendous undertaking. The hay was needed to keep the farmsteads milk cows, pigs and horses going through the long winters. Farmers in the area also raised barley, corn and wheat. The hay was cut three times per year, at its highest maturation point. At the time of the photograph above, the fields would have been cut by hand or with a mower. The implement was hitched up to two horses and cut the hay with reciprocating teeth, much the same as a barber’s electric shaver does. Charles or his brother Wilson could sit on metal seat and ride back and forth, stopping to oil the mechanism. A hand held scythe was used to render every last tuft of grain for the winter from the edges of the field, close to trees, fencing and the house. The mower beat the rate at which Bentley’s grandfather would have cut hay by hand. Conditions for cutting had to be just right. Plants were cut at their peak of growth, insuring the highest nutrient values. It needed to be dry as well. The morning dew that so fascinated Bentley, ruined hay. Improperly dried hay fermented, which led to fires in the barns. A stretch of low barometric pressure, and breezy days insured that the hay would dry before it was put away. The hay was gathered into piles for further drying and to facilitate pick up. The picture above shows the Bentley crew at work. Neighbors often helped each other through the feverish days; Itinerant immigrants from Ireland were also common in Jericho. They were not landowners but did help out on area farms. The long days were broken with swigs of switchel. Switchel consisted of water, vinegar, and bit of sweetener, like honey or maple sugar. There was a preferred method for packing the wagon for the ride to the barn. From front to back, outer sections of the wagon were placed first. Middle sections, or tumbles, held the others in place. The number of sections wide would decrease as the layers went up. Later pieces of farm equipment called elevators greatly reduced the work required of farmers. The elevator, a horse powered escalator of sorts, carried the hay up and into the hay wagon, where hands could pack it. The Bentley barn lay across Nashville Road. It housed the animals below and the hay above. Many barns of the time barns were fitted with a block and tackle, with grappling hooks that could be lowered onto the wagon. The hay was then lifted into the barn, where the block and tackle ran on a rail inside the barns peak. The load could then be packed away in the loft. The familiar small bales we can pick up at a garden store were introduced much later to Jericho. They made the work no less tiresome, but a crew could cover a lot more ground, and a greater volume of material could be put away in a barn. Even toward the end of Bentley’s life haying equipment fitted for horsepower was still everywhere, as hardscrabble farmers adapted them for use in early tractors. By Wayne Howe AT THE
GIFT SHOP Stop by the online Gift Shop of the Snowflake Bentley web site and check out our new items based on Bentley's work. There is an exciting new set of prints made from Bentley's original glass plate lantern slides. A four color print process was used to capture the antique look of the original image. They are available matted and/or framed. Also new this year, is the second of our suncatchers designed using an original Bentley photomicrograph. This year the suncatcher comes in a beautiful shade of amethyst. Available individually or as a set with the first suncatcher that was issued last year. The newest "hot" item is a fantastic Snowflake Thermometer Poster. Creator, Dorothy Wallace-Senft, cleverly used over 400 of Bentley's snow crystal images to create this unique collage. It shows the type of snow crystal formation in relation to the temperature. It also has a picture of Bentley at his camera. As always, a portion of every sale made at the Bentley online gift shop is donated to the Jericho Historical Society to aid in their mission of preserving the legacy of Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley. top of page
in this issue:
Don't forget February 9th is Bentley's birthday, he was born in Jericho, Vermont 138 years ago . This holiday season once again brought record numbers of visitors to the snowflakebentley.com website. The pre-Christmas peak came a bit earlier this year with over 2800 visitors on the 5th of January and an average of over 2500 visitors per day, during Christmas itself traffic drops by more than half (the day before and after). We had a huge surge in traffic around January 8th with almost 3000 visitors per day. I think there was a segment on Bentley on the Weather Channel and in Portland, Maine. We have added a search function to the website at the bottom of the home page, this should make it a bit easier to find specific information you are looking for. The Weather Doctor has added some article on Bentley and our own #1 contributor Duncan Blanchard at http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/history/ Also Duncan has notified me that he will be giving his Bentley talk on February 8, at a library near Troy, NY, and a condensed, 30-minute version at the Buffalo Museum of Science on February 22. We get many requests for teaching materials from all over for all ages. If you can share some of your Teaching materials and resources, maybe we can get some interaction going on between schools on the Message Board. WBZ Comes To Jericho A major television and radio company came up to Jericho on December 4th to do a story on Bentley. Mish Michaels, a meteorologist for the TV station did the story. You may have seen her on the Atmospheres series on the Weather Channel. She and her photographer were in Jericho for eleven hours filming. Michaels seemed genuinely fascinated with Bentley, and had evidently done quite a bit of homework before she came. I believe she talked to Duncan Blanchard before arriving. She appreciated Bentley's connection with some very important early figures in the National Weather Service. They filmed extensively in the gallery, and included some things I'd brought from the archives. I took them over to the Historic Marker, Graveside, the house and the store. They also extensively interviewed me. I encouraged them to take a shot in front of the Mill as well. I was sure to show them the Craft Shop, and they took snippets from the CD. The piece, which will be edited to three or four minutes, will air in January or early February on BZ, so it will be seen through cable in various spots around New England. It may also be featured nationally on the Weather Channel. We should expect to get a copy. Michaels is also on the board of the Blue Hill Observatory, outside Boston. It is one of the earliest, and most important weather facilities in the nation, recognized as a national historic site and protected by the national park service. It is also one of the first places that Bentley sold his snowflakes to! Michaels said Blue Hill may be mounting an exhibition in the next two years, and I offered that we would be interested in lending materials to it. Stay tuned. The video clip is now available online, click here to view. Portland's Channel 6 Visits A film crew of three drove over from Maine to film the Bentley story. They had done less research, but interviewed me in the gallery, took some pictures, and were including footage of the marker on the Green, and were heading out to the house. I'd spoken with Diane Shullenberger last week and she continues to be very open to people coming out unannounced to the house for outside shots. This three-minute piece will be part of a half hour weather feature that will air before Christmas. Odds and Ends In the last five or six years alone, we've hosted film crews from Boston twice, Maine, Vermont Public Television, WCAX, Community Access and now Maine. In addition there references or small features on Bentley in a number of current magazines in the archive. Green Mountain Coffee and Cabot Cheese have also featured the Bentley story in their merchandise. These things, the CD-ROM, the website and Vermont Snowflakes products are all getting the word out on this man of passion and perseverance. Winter Wonders at the Buffalo Museum of Science Exhibit forecast for November thru February: Expect snow. Celebrate the region's novel relationship to powdery precipitation in this new, winter tradition, which opens November 22 showcasing our hefty collection of Wilson A. Bentley snowflake images. Explore meteorology displays, plant and animal adaptations and enjoy cultural celebrations in this 'must do' winter experience. Years after his death his niece, Alice Hamalainen, contacted the Smithsonian about purchasing Bentley's snow crystal collection for $500. She respected the scientific and artistic value of her uncle's lifelong passion and wanted it preserved by a museum. The Smithsonian declined. Hamalainen approached the Buffalo Museum of Science. She knew Bentley lectured in Buffalo in 1924. In 1947, the museum board of managers authorized the acquisition. The 10,723 piece Bentley collection includes images of precipitation, snowflakes, frost, dew on spider webs and plants, clouds, snowflake composites and self-portraits. Some equipment and a weather map are also archived. The Jericho Historical Society in Vermont has supported this project by loaning the Buffalo Museum of Science Bentley's original bellows camera and microscope, as well as a quilt made by Bentley's mother, for the three month exhibit. The Society's web site is dedicated to Bentley's life work and the stunning images he left behind. For more information about the fascinating 'Snowflake Man' , visit www.snowflakebentley.com Make sure you mark your calendars. The Buffalo Museum's fun, winter experience drifts in November 22, 2002 with snowfall through February 23, 2003. Mina Seeley by Duncan C. Blanchard Schoolteachers came and went in the one-room schoolhouse down the road from the Bentley’s. Though they came from other towns in Vermont, during the months of the school year they boarded with a family within walking distance of the school, and Bentley got to know them. It is said that he developed more than a passing interest in some of them, and one in particular has always been remembered by those who knew him. She was Mina Seeley, whose hometown was in Johnson, Vermont, about twenty miles northeast of Jericho. Nothing is known of her family or how she happened to come to the Nashville section of Jericho, but it is possible that Henry Seeley, who got Bentley started in photography, was either her father or uncle, and she was returning to the area where she grew up. One of Henry’s sisters was Mina Jane and it is conceivable that Mina Seeley was named after her.
His niece Alice recalls that there was a few schoolteachers that had a crush on him, and he’d get letters from them. I remember one, a Mina Seeley was one. But Bentley’s neighbor, Izetta Barrett, felt differently: I guess he kind of liked her, but he wouldn’t be anything she’d bother with much. The temperaments would not be compatible at all. She was a schoolteacher, and she was kind of a sassy one. Bentley’s sister-in-law, Mary, without identifying the woman, said that Bentley was briefly engaged to be married, but the engagement was broken off when the woman realized she would have to compete with the snow crystals for his love and attention. If this woman was Mina Seeley, as seems likely, she had reluctantly come to the same conclusion as did Izetta Barrett that a clash of temperaments prevented her from spending the rest of her life with Wilson Bentley. What did Bentley himself have to say about Mina Seeley? Nothing is known about letters that may have passed between them for they have been lost, but she is mentioned in his notebooks. On January 7, 1912, after many pages of details about his photography of frost, snow crystals, and dew, he wrote: Mina Seeley’s photo . . . taken by bay window front & side light. Black background. He took a second photograph with the same exposure time, seven seconds, in middle room direct front light. Two weeks later he mentioned taking more photographs of Mina, this time along with photographs of his oldest niece, Agnes, who was marred to Lee Whittemore, and her son Kenneth. Three years passed. During that time the pages of Bentley’s notebook were filled only with the details of his work. But early in February, 1915, he wrote, along with a few details on exposure time and the setting of the camera bellows, Window frost Feb 4 monogram Mina. Never again is Mina mentioned in his notebooks. What is one to make of this window frost monogram of Mina? In one of Bentley’s articles on frost, he wrote about the curious patterns the frost makes on windows, often following scratches on the glass. To illustrate this, he lightly scratched his initials WAB on the windowpane, let the frost form overnight, and the next morning took a photograph that showed his initials formed by elegant, feathery lines of frost. Perhaps in a similar way he had scratched Mina’s name on a winter’s windowpane to let the beautiful frost patterns poignantly remind him of the beauty of a woman who had left his life forever. Duncan C. Blanchard 2003 Pewter Snowflake Ornament The concept drawings for the 2003 snowflake ornament are in and have been approved. The next phase is to cast a prototype and make any necessary changes. Once the prototype is approved the ornament will go into production and should be available in March.
This will be the seventh ornament in the collection which has become very popular throughout the country. Each ornament is designed from an original Wilson A. Bentley snowflake photomicrograph from the archives of the Jericho Historical Society. They are handcrafted exclusively for Vermont Snowflakes by Danforth Pewterers of Middlebury Vermont. Let us know what you think. At The Gift Shop
in this issue:
February 9th is Bentley's birthday, 137 years ago he was born in Jericho, Vermont. He left Jericho only occasionally and this months newsletter includes an article By Duncan Blanchard on Bentley's trip to Canada. The holiday season brought record numbers of visitors to the snowflakebentley.com website. with a peak just before Christmas of over 2000 visitors per day, during Christmas itself traffic drops by more than half(the day before and after). We had a huge surge in traffic around the first of the year after a segment on Martha Stewart TV mentioned the Bentley CD, and a week later "Chronicle' in Boston aired a piece on Bentley. On October 27th 2001 Duncan Blanchard, Author of the Bentley Biography "The Snowflake Man" came to Jericho and presented a slide show and spoke of Bentley. There was a good crowd for the event and there were people of all ages interested in what Mr. Blanchard had to say about Bentley. The 1 hr. VHS Videos can be purchased online at http://wolf1.com/vidorder.htm We get many requests for teaching materials from all over for all ages. If you can share some of your Teaching materials and resources, maybe we can get some interaction going on between schools on the Message Board. Bentley Material
In Good Hands At Buffalo When members of the Jericho Historical Society first learned that thousands of Bentley's negatives and slides were housed at the Buffalo Museum of Science, we imagined the worst possible conditions for them. Languishing in some damp basement, piled into shoeboxes, the floor littered with labels that had come unglued. We imagined some reduced to shards of glass. We knew there had been efforts to begin to catalogue them, but imagined them unceremoniously relegated to an obscure shelf. Given our own archival space, we were surprised to find the museum's collection in very good care. The material is housed in a climate controlled storage area. For the most part, slides were held individually in acid free envelopes. The envelopes are stored in cases. Careful cataloguing has been done. The materials need conservation, and the Museum is pursuing this as a separate project, with some financial assistance from JHS. It is hoped that a complete catalogue and preservation of the original material will allow Bentley's work to be shared for generations to come. Bentley in Canada
Bentley's fascination and utter devotion to the snow crystals so dominated his life that only once did he leave Jericho in the winter for more than a week. Of course he took his snow crystal camera with him. Dr. H. T. Barnes, a physics professor at McGill University in Montreal, had known of Bentley's work for over twenty-five years, and invited him to work in Canada during the first two months of 1925. Barnes, about the same age as Bentley, was interested in the formation of ice in rivers and especially the engineering problems associated with ice in the intake of hydroelectric stations on the St. Lawrence River. The last two days of 1924 must have been busy and exciting for Bentley, so much so that he neglected what had been as natural as breathing in and out, his daily listing of temperatures and cloud conditions in his weather notebook. These entries had been marching through the pages without a break in step for many a year, so their absence was significant. But the very next day, January 1, 1925, the entries appear again, though in a different handwriting, probably that of his nephew, Alric, who with his wife lived in the other side of the farmhouse. The day before, Bentley and his cameras had left Jericho by train for the one-hundred-mile journey north to Montreal. "I experienced the thrill of anticipation, such as comes to an explorer about to enter unexplored regions," Bentley said. "Would the snowflakes be better, or the reverse there? And would the Canadian designs be even more marvelous than those secured in Vermont?" Bentley was met in Montreal by Professor Barnes. That same day, as if to herald his coming, an article in a Montreal newspaper featured his work with the snow crystals. The following week was a busy one for Bentley. He gave several lectures, but like any tourist also enjoyed the sights of Montreal. "I spent a delightful week in that picturesque city, built around one of the most ancient volcanoes known, Mount Royal." During that week he met Barnes's son, William, who like his father, had earned his doctorate in physics and was interested in the physics of ice. Four years later, William Barnes would make history by being the first to show by careful experiment that the water molecules in a unit cell of ice locked themselves together in a hexagonal structure. His X-ray crystallography experiments were done at the famed Royal Institution in London in the laboratory of Sir William Bragg, a Nobel Laureate for his work with X-rays and crystal structure. Several years earlier, Bragg had deduced on theoretical grounds the hexagonal structure and unit cell dimensions of ice, but it was William Barnes who first showed that the theory was correct. Most likely the younger Barnes had been influenced in his choice of research topics by his father. But it is possible, however, that Bentley's lectures that first week in January of 1925 inspired him to push onward to solve the puzzle of the crystal structure of ice and snow crystals. About a week later, Bentley went to Morrisburg, a small Canadian town on the St. Lawrence River about eighty miles west of Montreal, where Barnes apparently was involved in some research projects on river ice. He set up his camera in anticipation of photographing snow crystals "more marvelous" than those that fell back home in Jericho. Though it snowed several times in the next two weeks, only once did Bentley find the crystals of sufficient interest to take photographs. He spent time getting to know the people of the town. "They are a fine progressive people," he said "kind and accommodating to a degree, and possessing many fine traits." He must have found the girls' smiles to his liking, for he added that "the girls of the St. Lawrence valley are [extraordinarily] lovely." On about January 22, Bentley returned to "dear old Vermont for a lecture at Randolph." Immediately after the lecture he went home. He said that "an attack of the grip kept me home for ten days." One suspects, however, since he had brought his camera back with him, that he was anxious to return home to photograph the snows of Jericho, illness or no illness. He did just that during two storms the following week, then packed up and returned to Morrisburg on February 7. But the snows that came in February were no better than those in January. Bentley found the air along the river too humid and foggy for his snow crystal work. He began to photograph frost formations on windows, and he gave lectures at towns near Morrisburg and at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. His fame seemed to precede him. While passing through one town, he noticed a magnificent frost formation on the window of a hardware store. He just had to photograph it. "I hunted up a photographer," Bentley said. "He seemed uninterested until he learned the snowflake man was the one desiring his services, after which he was most zealous in securing, by my help, what I wanted, a frost masterpiece." Bentley appeared to enjoy his stay in Morrisburg. He found that the weeks: ". . . went happily by among its friendly people, with music and song, and friendly conversation. Much of my time was necessarily spent answering the flood of letters, kindly appreciative ones, that I received from all over, even China, Turkey, and England, after the American Magazine article came out." This article, published in February, 1925, was the best and most extensive about Bentley and his snow crystals since a Boston Globe article of 1921. On March 1 he left Morrisburg to return to Jericho. He had made many friends, most of whom he would never see again. "One knowing them," he said, "would not wonder that my eyes were moist as I took the train to leave them" With his friends left far behind, he sat in quiet solitude as the train rumbled along toward Jericho. Again and again a question kept coming to his mind: "Could it be that, through some strange freak of accident or providence, the one man who loves snowflakes most had been born at the most favorable spot on earth for the study and photographing of them.?" He had obtained only sixteen photographs during his winter's stay in Morrisburg. Adding those to what he had photographed in Jericho, he had only forty-two for the entire winter, one of his poorest efforts ever. But at winter's end he wrote in his notebook that he had photographed 4,362 snow crystals since his first one in 1885.
In this issue:
Duncan Blanchard to Visit Jericho Scientist and author, Duncan Blanchard will present his lecture and visual presentation on the life and work of Wilson Bentley to the Jericho Historical Society on Saturday, October 27, at 7:00 P.M. The program will be held at the Old Red Mill in Jericho and is open to the public. Admission is free. Information: (802) 899-3225 Duncan Blanchard is a frequent contributor and consultant to the "Snowflake" Bentley Web site and is author of the 1998 biography "The Snowflake Man". The Odyssey of
Bentley's Photographic Negatives At the beginning of an article about Wilson Bentley in the December, 1947, issue of Hobbies, a magazine published by the Buffalo Museum of Science, Dr. Carlos Cummings, the director of the Museum, wrote: "It is with the greatest pleasure that the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences is able to announce as a recent acquisition a collection of nearly twelve thousand photographic negatives and plates made therefrom, representing the life work of Wilson Alwyn Bentley." Bentley died in December,1931, and sixteen years passed before his vast collection of negatives and plates found a home at the Museum of Science in Buffalo, New York. But why Buffalo, and why did so many years pass before the collection made its way there? Therein lies an interesting tale. To begin with, Bentley and Dr. Cummings were friends and apparently knew each other as early as 1922. In an entry in his notebook on February 9, 1922, next to some comments about a snow crystal he had photographed, Bentley wrote that it was a "favorite at Buffalo." This suggests he had shown a slide of this snow crystal to a receptive audience in Buffalo. Had Bentley made more than one trip to Buffalo? Possibly, but we do know that he made at least one. In an article about him in the February, 1925, issue of The American Magazine, Bentley is quoted as saying: "Last winter I was to lecture in Buffalo before the Society of Natural Sciences. Just before I took the train at the village it began to snow, and I can't tell you how I hated to leave! A snowstorm is always so exciting to me. I never know when I am going to find some wonderful prize! But this time, when we had gone down the line a few miles, I saw that the flakes were becoming granular. Then I settled back, quite content. I knew I wasn't missing any chances." That Bentley made more than one trip to Buffalo is suggested by a remark made by Cummings in his article. He wrote: "He was no stranger to our own Hayes Lecture Course, and the writer has the most vivid recollection of the first time he saw these magnificent enlargements on the screen." Cummings probably found a common interest with Bentley after reading some of his articles. Among his many talents, Cummings was an excellent lecturer on a variety of subjects in the natural sciences. His topics ranged widely, from travel, birds, bees, to butterflies, flowers, and fungi, all illustrated with his own superb photographs. These photographs were in great demand, many appearing in the National Geographic Magazine. No doubt Cummings and Bentley formed a mutual admiration society! Most likely it was through an invitation from Cummings to give a lecture that Bentley visited Buffalo and later published an article "Snowflakes, Nature's Wonder Gems" in the January, 1929, issue of Hobbies. Not long after Bentley died, one of his nieces, Alice Bentley Hamalainen, and her husband Matti came to Bentley's home to collect the many thousands of glass plates and lantern slides. At that time, they were living in Andover, Vermont, with her father, Wilson Bentley's older brother Charles. In 1961, I interviewed Mrs. Hamalainen and asked her how they got the vast collection of plates and slides to Andover. It couldn't have been an easy job, for they must have weighted at least seven or eight hundred pounds. She said it wasn't, especially since they didn't get started for Andover until late in the day. They had a pick-up truck, and in the back, along with the plates and slides in wooden crates, they had an old desk that had belonged to her grandmother. With the springs nearly flat under the heavy load, the pick-up creaked and groaned as they left Jericho and headed south to Andover. Soon darkness fell, and Matti put his headlights on. But as Mrs. Hamalainen told me: "Matti said, well we don't seem to have any lights. Better get out and look and see. He couldn't see to drive, so he said, yes, the lights are on. That's funny, they don't show up on the road. So we drove a ways further, and we were on top of a hill, and the headlights hit way over on some trees. They were way up on top of the trees. With such a heavy load we had to drive carefully until we got to a garage and had them put down. Way down. That glass was so heavy." It must have been an unusual sight to see the pick-up so loaded down in the rear that the front with the headlights was pointing upward into the night sky like search lights at a carnival. And so it was that they limped into Andover with the life's work of Wilson Bentley. But what was to become of it? A few years later, in July 1, 1938, in an article in The Burlington Free Press, Mrs. Hamalainen said that "the family is willing to dispose of these valuable negatives for a reasonable consideration. They feel that a man's life work should serve some purpose other than taking up space in the attic." She said they had had several offers, but none of them was acceptable. She went on to say: "Money is not the main thing, but because we want to see his work being put to good use we feel that we want to dispose of his slides and negatives where they will be appreciated, and put to some use and benefit to the general public. Uncle Wilson wanted his work to help all." The years passed, and apparently no "reasonable consideration" was offered to the family. But when Charles Bentley died in August, 1947, Mrs. Hamalainen sold the farm two months later. She realized it would not be feasible to move the plates and slides yet again, so she had to quickly find a final home for them. In earlier years, she told me, the Smithsonian Institution had an interest in them, but: ". . . they told me if we packed them well and shipped them to them they would accept them, so I didn't pay any attention to them anymore. And Syracuse, I found a letter from Syracuse that they had written to uncle sometime, so I thought they might be interested. They were but they didn't have any money to buy them, and I wasn't about to give them to them for nothing. So I wrote to Buffalo. They couldn't wait to write. They telephoned right off, and Simmons came and picked them up." I don't know how she knew that the Buffalo Museum of Science might be interested in the Bentley collection. It's possible that she had the copy of Hobbies in which Bentley had published his article, or perhaps she had a letter from Cummings from years past in which he had made an insufficient offer for the collection. I don't know how much money Dr. Cummings offered Mrs. Hamalainen for it, but she quickly accepted. The Simmons she spoke of was Charles E. Simmons, Staff Photographer for the Buffalo Museum of Science. "He came and there were some glass plates he threw out, you know, that weren't very good. Some of them had the film scraped away or were cracked, so he sorted all day long. He said he should have come with a station wagon. He had to drive very carefully. He said if there are any bumps my fenders will be all worn out, or my tires will be before we get to Buffalo. He stayed overnight someplace and they told him to park out front. Oh no, I'm not parking out front with all that cargo in there, he said, so they gave him a place out back of the building to park his car. He had to put more air in his tires." The Bentley collection arrived at the Buffalo Museum of Science in the fall of 1947, just in time for Cummings to write about it in the December issue of Hobbies. Twenty-one years later, in the summer of 1968, when I started to gather material for a biography of Wilson Bentley, I visited the Museum of Science to look at the Bentley collection. Little attempt had been made to catalog it. Most of it appeared to be in the same boxes that Simmons had brought on that momentous trip from Vermont. But all that changed dramatically about 1979 when Dr. Virginia Cummings, daughter of Carlos Cummings, who had been director of the Museum from 1970 to 1979, retired. In retirement, she spent many years on the prodigious task of separating, identifying, and cataloging the many thousands of glass plates and negatives. Each plate was placed in archival envelopes and boxes. She was able to identify the glass plate negative that corresponded with many of the more than 2,400 photographs in Bentley's beautiful book Snow Crystals. Bentley had numbered most of his negatives but over 2,000 were not. These were of such things as frost, dew, snow crystal composites, and self portraits. Cummings pored through the vast collection and found a total of 10,958 plates (Was her father's statement in 1947 of "nearly 12,000 photographic negatives and plates" an overestimate, or were damaged plates discarded over the years?). This included many of Bentley's snow crystal sets, each consisting of the original negative of a snow crystal, a positive, and a copy negative. It was this copy negative that Bentley used to cut away the emulsion on the glass plate around the snow crystal. By using only the copy negatives for his positive prints, he produced his classic photographs of snow crystals that stood out elegantly against a black background like stars in a midnight sky. Since Virginia Cummings's death in 1997, work has continued on cataloguing and taking care of the Bentley collection. Some of the photographic plates are in need of preservation. Under the direction of Elizabeth Robins, the Registrar of the Buffalo Museum of Science, efforts are presently being made to get outside help and expertise on the best way to accomplish this task. The Museum is determined that the Bentley collection will be around to be admired and enjoyed for generations to come. At the Gift Shop Get a jump on your holiday shopping. Visit the Bentley web site Gift Shop for a unique selection of "Snowflake" Bentley reproductions and collectibles. New this year is the 2001 Collection which includes a pewter ornament, scatter pin, necklace, and zipper pull. There is also a wide selection of Bentley reproduction snowflake prints, books, t-shirts, and the award winning Wilson Bentley Digital Archives CD-ROM. http://www.vermontsnowflakes.com Negatives Provide
Second Life for Bentley Work The Buffalo Museum of Science and the Jericho Historical Society have agreed to work together for the dissemination of Bentley's photographs and scientific work. David Chesebrough, president of the Buffalo Museum commented that it would be a "productive partnership." The partnership seeks to disseminate Bentley's work through the development of educational materials, sale of photographic prints, and other materials related to Bentley's work in early meteorology. The Buffalo Museum of Science is the largest depository of Bentley negatives. This July, Ray Miglionico and myself, both of the Jericho Historical Society, traveled to Buffalo to begin to formalize a partnership. Overtures between the two institutions had occurred over the last two years, with Betty Robbins visiting the Bentley Gallery then. During this trip Mr. Miglionico and Mr. Howe were interested in access to Bentley's negatives. Buffalo was interested in biographical materials and Bentley products they might incorporate in future exhibits. The agreement will allow sharing of resources for future endeavors by both groups. Wilson Bentley's photomicrographs were well known during his lifetime. He sold his prints to institutes of science and natural history. They demonstrated a scientific and aesthetic curiosity, which won him fame as a person of perseverance and character. They helped to illustrate the principals of meteorology, whose development had accelerated since the Civil War. The sale of his prints, the publication of his book, speaking engagements throughout the Northeast and as an exhibitor at the Pan-American Exposition gave Bentley's prints a wide distribution. Now prints are again available to new generations of viewers. At the Bentley Exhibit in Jericho, and through the Bentley website, the snowflake pictures speak to modern viewers with amazing clarity. The negatives are the most important legacy of Bentley, as they allow us to recreate his work for our study and enjoyment. As Ray Miglionico explained, "Demand for [Bentley items] has been strong, and in the future we'll continue to assure that prints are historically accurate." In Buffalo, Bentley's work may be incorporated into winter exhibits building on Buffalo's reputation for heavy snowfalls. Prints, educational materials and other Bentley related items will someday be available through Buffalo as well. Through the generosity of patrons and family members, the Jericho Historical Society's collection of Bentley items has grown. The days when Blair Williams could throw things in a box and head down the road to present to school's and community groups are past. Now the items require two adjoining rooms to display. With the negatives at Buffalo available to Jericho, they will be used to create a new series of prints. The proceeds will continue to increase the Bentley artifact collection and upgrade the Gallery. There's a wonderful irony in the fact that Bentley's work not only provided him income during his lifetime, but is providing income to further his work today." NEW ADDITION TO
BENTLEY RESOURCES We have added a new resource to the Bentley Web site in the form of seven graphs representing different aspects of Bentley's work compiled by Duncan Blanchard. The new resource is located at http://snowflakebentley.com/charts.htm Duncan Blanchard explains the data. "I obtained most of the information required to make these figures from Wilson Bentley's notebooks. Since he gave the date each snow crystal photograph was taken, and numbered them sequentially from No. 1 on January 15, 1885 to No. 5,381 on March 1, 1931, it was a straightforward though laborious job to obtain the necessary information." The Titles of the Graphs: Number of Snow Crystal Photos per Year Maximum Number of Crystals Photographed in One Day Number of Working Days Average Number of Photos Per Working Day Seasonal Snowfall (inches/year) in Jericho, Vermont, or Snow Crystal Photos/yr. Number of Photos Per Inch of Snow Articles By Bentley/Articles About Bentley As always, purchases at the Gift Shop help preserve the legacy of Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley. Thanks to everyone who supported us this past holiday season!!! If you would like to contribute writings to this newsletter please e-mail us at info@snowflakebentley.com In this issue:
Bentley the Movie Star by Duncan Blanchard On a July day over thirty years ago, with my camera, tape recorder, and notebook, I drove to Jericho, Vermont, to see where Wilson Bentley spent his entire life. I was determined to learn all I could about him from people who knew him. But I had no idea who these people were, so I went to the local post office, thinking that someone there might know people who knew Bentley. I was in luck. There I met Elinor Merle, who had been the editor of the 1963 History of Jericho. She knew everybody in town! As a young girl, she had known Bentley and said he had given her some of his photographs of snow crystals. She told me I should talk to Amy Bentley Hunt, one of Bentley’s nieces, and gave me directions to her home in Jericho Center. I found Mrs. Hunt to be a fountain of information about Bentley. She was animated and excited that afternoon as she told me about her “Uncle Willie,” and for the first time I began to realize what a remarkable man Bentley was. She spoke not only about his work with the snowflakes but about his efforts to measure the sizes of raindrops. I knew about these, but it was good to hear that Bentley had patiently described his raindrop experiments to his nieces and nephews. As Mrs. Hunt was telling me about the experiments, Mother Nature obliged with a display of darkening clouds, followed by thunder and the drumming of raindrops hitting the roof. The ghost of Bentley was at work! During our conversation, Mrs. Hunt said that her uncle was in a movie. When I asked when and where could I find the movie, she had no idea, except that it was a long time ago. In the following year I talked to several other people who had known Bentley, and asked them about the movie. They said, yes, they had seen it years ago but knew nothing about its whereabouts. One afternoon I was interviewing another of Bentley’s nieces, Alice Bentley Hamalainen, in her home in Weston, Vermont, and of course I asked about the movie. By this time I had about given up hope that I would ever find it. But she said, “Oh, I have something way in the back of my hall closet. I haven’t looked at it in years. Maybe it’s what you are looking for.” She left the room and returned several minutes later with a small burlap bag. Opening it, I pulled out a round metal container about six inches diameter. Inside I found a small reel of 35-mm film. Could this be the missing movie? Excitedly I unrolled a few feet of the film, held it up to some light, and there was Wilson Bentley with his camera! Mrs. Hamalainen let me borrow the film. I had copies made on 16- mm film for the newly-formed Jericho Historical Society and the Vermont Historical Society. A notation on the outside of the container holding the 35- mm film suggested that the movie was made in 1917 by Pathé News, an organization that before the age of television made movies of news events to be shown at movie theaters. The movie runs for only a few minutes, but it is the only known motion picture of Bentley in action. Still photographs taken that day would be used many times by Bentley and others in later articles and are still being used today. Mrs. Alric Bentley, the wife of one of Bentley’s nephews, was at the farmhouse the day the movie people showed up. She told me about some of the hilarious things that happened that day. They made Bentley move his camera and microscopes out of the unheated woodshed, where he took all his photographs of snow crystals, and place them alongside the house near his kitchen window. Presumably this was because there was not enough light or room in the woodshed to take movies. They had him wear his best dress-up clothes: black tie, dark overcoat, and a soft felt hat. Bentley must have fussed and fumed over this, as he never worked out of doors with his camera, and he certainly never dressed up when he did his photography. Since the thin broom straw that he used to transfer a snow crystal from his blackboard to a microscope slide would never show up in the movie, the photographers had him use a tapered piece of wood as thick as a pencil. This only served to increase his irritation. But Bentley’s irritation must have reached record levels when the photographers decided it would be nice to have snow falling while their cameras were rolling. But it wasn’t snowing that day, though there was some snow on the ground. No problem! What passed as the special effects team of Pathé News leapt into action. They scooped some snow from the ground into a basket and had Alric Bentley take it to a second floor bedroom where he tossed handfuls of it into the air from an open window. It was a disaster! Instead of having soft white snowflakes descend slowly and uniformly over Bentley, large chunks of snow fell like hailstones, some striking his hat, others his shoulders, producing splashes of snow that dotted his hat and coat with white smears. No matter. Snow was snow. The movie camera kept rolling and captured Bentley working in his element. To finish the work that day the photographers took movies of individual snow crystals drifting downward. Not being able to photograph such small crystals or to control where they fell, special effects again came to the rescue. They cut models of the crystals several inches in diameter out of heavy white paper and strung them a foot or so apart on a thin wire. Someone held the upper end of the wire above and in front of the movie camera, and slowly let it descend while at the same time twisting it to make the paper snow crystals spiral as they fell downward. This was all well and good, but the person controlling the wire must have had hiccups; the movie shows sudden starts and stops superimposed on the smooth descent of the crystals. Although this may have been the only movie made of Bentley, his marvelous photographs of dew, frost, and snow crystals appeared on movie screens across the country and in England. Late in 1921, many of these pictures were published in England in Pearson’s Magazine. An editor’s note said that the pictures “. . . are now being shown on the screen by the Goldwyn Bray Pictograph.” Now my dictionary defines a pictograph as a picture representing an idea, so it seems clear that no movie is involved here. Or is it clear? Read on. Bentley himself mentioned the pictograph at the beginning of an article he wrote for the February, 1922, issue of The Guide to Nature. Eager for all to see it, he said: “My photographic studies of snow crystals and water forms have been pursued over a period of thirty-five years. The many illustrated articles about them by myself and others have spread their fame until their marvelous beauty has become almost common knowledge. Recently the Bray Studios, New York, have made a lovely motion picture of them—Goldwyn Bray Pictograph No. 7001, entitled ‘Mysteries of Snow,’ released over the Goldwyn circuit—and this will enable millions of people to enjoy them. All those who wish to see this picture should request the managers of movie houses to get it.” When Bentley speaks of “a lovely motion picture,” are we to believe that something is actually moving on the screen, or, as is more likely, is he saying that his many photographs of dew, frost, and snow crystals are shown one after the other on the screen in a theater where motion pictures are shown? I believe the latter is true, but until we unearth a copy of The Goldwyn Bray Pictograph No. 7001, which may now be quietly lying under decades of dust in some back room of historical films, we will never be sure. To confuse the issue even more is what Bentley told the author of an article about him in the November, 1922, issue of The Vermonter. Bentley said: “Last winter the movie people brought up their experts and their picture machines and had me help them take moving pictures of the growth of a snowflake crystal. Of course we couldn’t actually get the growth or formation of one, but we took it in reverse order; that is, as it melted, which amounts to the same thing. People who have seen this film declare it to be one of the most wonderful and interesting, as well as [the most] beautiful pictures they have ever seen.” I think The Vermonter writer misquoted Bentley, for surely he knew that when a snow crystal melts to produce a drop of water, it is not the reverse of the growth of the crystal. In using the word “melted,” he must have been talking about the evaporation or the sublimation of the crystal, where the water molecules leave the crystal for the atmosphere around it. Even that, however, the sublimation of a crystal on a microscope slide, is not quite the “reverse order” of the growth of a crystal as it falls through the air. But rather than muddy the waters any further, we’ll have to wait until the Goldwyn Bray Pictograph No. 7001 is found. It’s my guess that the movie of the subliming crystal was made at the same time as the pictograph, and may even be a part of it. If any readers of this article have an idea how to locate the lost pictograph, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave your suggestions on the Message Board of this Web site. Duncan C. Blanchard June 2000 Bentley's Birthday Bentley's 136th birthday on February 9th was relatively quiet this year in Jericho. There were some special activities planned at the Jericho Elementary School and a number of visits to the Bentley Exhibit by other Vermont schoolchildren. It's always fun to see the excitement on a child's face when they look at a snowflake up close for the first time. If you're planning a skiing trip to Vermont (which by the way is phenomenal this year) during the President's Week Holiday, the Bentley Exhibit will be open full time. From February 17 to March 6 the hours are, Monday thru Saturday - 10:00 am to 5:00 pm and Sunday - 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM Admission to the Exhibit is free. Call (802) 899-3225 for more information.
Snowflakebentley.com holiday visits The 2000 holiday season brought a "blizzard' of visitors to the snowflakebentley.com website. Our peak week was the 12th and 13th of December with about 2,200 visitors per day. The Bentley site was linked to by over 400 other web sites (thanks for all your links) and almost 3,000 separate web pages. A vast majority of visitors came to look at snowflakes and about 35% visited the Resources of articles. We have been getting a lot of positive feedback from visitors and will be adding the more recent visitor comments to the "contact" page. We plan a site revision in the near future so if there are any requests for other Bentley info or other ideas e-mail us at info@snowflakebentley.com
At the Gift Shop Two new book offerings are now available at the Snowflake Bentley web site Gift Shop. The first is "Snowflakes in Photographs" by W.A. Bentley. This is an abridged version of the book "Snow Crystals". The publisher has painstakingly selected the best plates from the larger collection and included one of Bentley's most famous articles, "Photographing Snowflakes"(reprint of article originally published for Popular Mechanics in 1922). The book sells for $9.95. Also available is "Snowflake Bentley" by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, illustrated by Mary Azarian. This is a classic children's book about the Vermont farmer who photographed snowflakes. This heart warming story, depicting the life and times of this unique man, has been enjoyed by children throughout the country. Beautifully illustrated with the wood block prints of Vermont artist Mary Azarian. "Snowflake Bentley" was the winner of the 1999 Caldecott Medal for illustrations. This hard cover version sells for $16.00. The Bentley Gift Shop had a tremendous holiday season with support from hundreds of site visitors. This year there will be added selections to the "Snowflake Bentley Collection" by Vermont Snowflakes. Along with the 2001 Official Pewter Ornament, the collection will be expanded to include a scatter pins, necklace, and for you skiers out there, a zipper pull. These new items will be available in the near future and will be announced in upcoming newsletters. Keep the Gift Shop in mind when deciding on birthday gifts, house warming gifts, or just a unique gift for that special person in your life. As always, purchases at the Gift Shop help preserve the legacy of Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley. Thanks to everyone who supported us this past holiday season!!! If you would like to contribute writings to this newsletter please e-mail us at info@snowflakebentley.com |
But how do you preserve this beauty and show it to others? He took the
microscope to an unheated woodshed attached to the back of the house. There he
spent countless hours peering through his microscope at snow crystals on a
microscope slide.
In the early 1880s, cameras were still a novelty and not used by the average
person, much less by farmers’ sons in the Mill Brook Valley of Jericho. Indeed,
George Eastman, who was later to revolutionize photography by making his Kodak
cameras easily available to amateurs, was just then inventing the flexible
paper films which were used for the next 80 to 100 years. So who or what gave
Bentley the idea it might be possible to use
photomicrography to capture on photographic plates all the intricate
details of a snow crystal? Perhaps he read about it in a magazine or book, or maybe
an older person, a friend of the family knowledgeable in photography, told him
about it and helped him get started. Bentley, in his many articles published
years later, never mentioned anyone helping him in his early struggles with
photography, but there is one person who may have been influential. 
The key process in all of this is the surface charges on the ice. So let’s look a little deeper
into the matter and see where these charges come from. If we magnify a region
of an ice crystal, such as the top view shown in (a) and (b) below, we see that
the positions of the water molecules are nicely arranged in a regular order.
This ordering has a honeycomb pattern. But if we look even closer, as in (c),
the regularity gets a little messed up. The oxygens (black) in each water
molecule sit nice and orderly in a hexagon, but the hydrogens (red) can be
arranged many different ways. The only restriction is the Bernal-Fowler bond
rule, which says that one hydrogen sits between every pair of adjacent oxygens.
But it turns out that the hydrogens are notorious rule breakers, and it is a
darn good thing too, as we will see later.
charges, whereas the “–“s on the bottom push
(remember that opposites attract and likes repel). Here is the last important
fact: the electrical dance has far more twists than hand-offs – about 10,000
times more. In other words, Bentley’s electric crystals prefer the twist to the
hand-off. From what we can tell, all this twisting attracts the OH-
to the surface. Once at the surface, these negative charges can move to another
surface during a rebounding collision. And that is basically what we now know
about the inner workings of the ice-crystal electric show. Enjoy. 
The people of Jericho and Underhill are grateful for the life of Blair Williams. Blair was force of nature. She led and influenced the society for more than thirty five years. That is extraordinary.
The "Snowflake" Bentley Collection by Vermont Snowflakes
Bentley had
made a large montage of a snow crystal from 125 of his snow crystal
photographs. The individual crystals, both large and small, were placed upon a
jet black background in such a way as to make a montage nearly three feet in
diameter. (The words large and small, as used here do not
refer to the size of the crystals photographed by Bentley. He always adjusted
the magnification of his camera such that the size of the crystals on his
negatives was about the same. But when he made the final prints of the
crystals, the enlarger was adjusted to make some prints larger than the
others.)
Bentley made
other montages. One was on a post card. On one side nearly forty small
crystals, all different, were placed to form a rectangle. Within the rectangle
he placed two large crystals. All the crystals were on a black background. The
other side of the card had a place for the stamp, correspondence and the
address. I suspect Bentley had hundreds of these post cards made, but very few
have survived.
Ice flowers on water are ice crystals that grow in liquid water. I like to call them puddle
crystals because you can sometimes see them in a puddle on a cold day. A puddle crystal looks somewhat like a dendritic
(‘tree-like’) snow crystal, but if you look closer in the images below, you
will notice some differences. For example, the puddle crystal does not have
many interior lines like the snow crystal. Also, the perimeter of the puddle
crystal is curved, not straight like many parts of the snow-crystal perimeter.
This type of curved ‘tree-like’ growth also occurs in other materials, and,
partly for this reason, it has been (and continues to be) studied far more
heavily than snow crystals, frost, rime, and Tyndall flowers combined. As the
snow crystal is more complex than the puddle crystal, and forms in far greater
variety, we can be sure that snow will keep scientists stumped for many years
to come.
Windowpane frost Unlike hoarfrost and rime, windowpane frost
does not stick out from the surface like stiff hairs, but instead grows mostly
across the surface like drawings on a sheet of paper. The number of pictures in Bentley’s book2 that are
devoted to windowpane frost is second only to that of snow crystals. It is easy
to see why; windowpane frost produces a wide variety of patterns, with some
looking like a collection of small flowers, some like jagged spikes, some like
artistic swirls, some like straight ferns, some like curved ferns, and some
like snow crystals. Some of these patterns are shown below.
The
2002 Pewter Snowflake Ornament is currently in the design phase.
The Bentley snowflake that was chosen for this year was submitted
to Danforth Pewterers of Middlebury, Vermont who will design and
produce an exclusive ornament for Vermont Snowflakes. The design
drawings have been approved and a prototype will be cast. Any
final changes are made from the prototype before they go into
production. The 2002 Ornament design will also be used for this
years Scatter Pin, Necklace, and Zipper Pull. All are due out
mid to late March.