In the 1880s, a man with an old-school bellows-style camera and a microscope jury-rigged them together and, for the first time, managed to snap photographs of snowflakes (he called them snow crystals).
Eventually, Vermont farmer Wilson Bentley collected thousands of the photos, and they were published in a groundbreaking book, to much acclaim. Just weeks later, unfortunately, he caught pneumonia while walking through a blizzard, and died.
His legacy lives on. From an Associated Press story in the Winnipeg Free Press:
Bentley’s photos don’t meet modern standards because he was “working with crude equipment,” said Kenneth G. Libbrecht, who has written seven books on snowflakes and grows snow crystals in a laboratory.
“But he did it so well that hardly anybody bothered to photograph snowflakes for almost 100 years,” said Libbrecht, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology.
Now, a show at the American Folk Art Museum in New York is selling a few of those images — at $5,000 a pop. But you can see some of them for free at the Snowflake Bentley Museum, where you can take a virtual tour of some of the images.
Really cool stuff.
Grant Hamilton
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Matt Goerzen