The last time it snowed in Portland, I remember dragging Jasper outside for a stroll around our neighborhood. I wanted him to soak in the winter wonderland that might not arrive again for a while. But last night when it snowed, it was me being dragged all around the neighborhood. Jasper had waited a long time for a chance to look at snow crystals through a magnifying lens. A chance discovery at our local library, an audiobook about the life of W.A. Bentley, amazed him.
W. A. Bentley grew up on a dairy farm in Vermont, and was homeschooled. He loved learning about water. He wondered how much water exactly was in each raindrop, so he set up an experiment to find out. He would put a shallow pan of flour out in a rainstorm, and the individual rain droplets would soak up flour to make pellets that would later make it possible to measure their volume. But what he loved most were snowflakes. He spent countless hours trying to draw snowflakes that he saw through his microscope so that others could see the beauty in a snowflake that quickly melts away. His parents truly wanted him to be able to pursue his passion, and eventually bought him a camera that would take photographs through great magnification. It cost as much as ten dairy cows. Through much trial and error, in 1885 at age 20 he finally succeeded in being the first person to ever photograph a snow crystal. The scientific community began to take notice, and in 1931 a book of his snow crystals was published. Unfortunately, that year he was to give a lecture on snow crystals when it began snowing. He left abruptly to return home to his camera, walking 6 miles through a Vermont blizzard. He caught pneumonia and did not recover.
Snowflakes may be easier to photograph with today's technology, but the photographs of "Snowflake Bentley" definitely stand the test of time. We have found two children's books on his life, and his original 1931 book is still readily available (see Amazon links below). Another amazing resource to learn about snowflakes is the website of Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, the Chairman of the Physics Dept. at Caltech (yeah, I know, snowflakes in southern California?). He has published some amazing books as well, and his
website has movies of snow crystals actually growing in laboratory conditions. And of course it's good to know how to make accurate six sided paper snowflakes. There are lots of instructions on the web, including here:
http://w3.cnm.edu/~cgulick/howtosnow.htm
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