Snowflake Bentley's Big Day

We had just a dusting of snow today, but at times it was swirling down thickly, and you could enjoy watching it. This is the first snow we'e had in a while, so I was struck to notice on Wikipedia's "On This Day" section of the home page that on (of course) this very day in 1885, a 19-year-old named Wilson Alwyn Bentley created what is probably the first photograph of a snowflake. If you've ever looked at a snowflake up close, you know that they tend to either melt or simply dissolve (technically, "sublimate") into thin air. They're pretty ephemeral. But young Wilson wanted to preserve them. It's easy to surmise that he loved them—he called them 'ice flowers" and "tiny miracles of beauty." He tried from the age of 15 to preserve the beauty he saw, first by drawing them, and then with photography. His mother gave him a microscope when he was 15, and later a camera. He attached the camera to the microscope, and after two years of trial and error, he managed to get his shot. And he kept at it, eventually creating some 5,000 images.

He was considered odd by the people of Jericho, Vermont, where he lived. They called him "Snowflake Man," but I imagine he was a reasonably well-liked person all the same. I can't find out if he ever married, or any of that. But he was recognized at long last by the scientific community, and I think he had a good life. He was the person who first suggested that no two snowflakes are alike. I always wondered about that—I would look out at a field of snow, and think about all the snow that ever fell, and wonder if there weren't two flakes just alike. How would you know? Where are the snows of yesteryear, after all? But I'm awfully fond of Wilson Alwyn Bentley for loving snow so much, and wanting us to love it too. People today would tell him to "get a life," I suppose, if they didn't understand. But I think he was a lucky man, to care so much about something. He died of pneumonia in 1931, after walking home through a blizzard. But all those years before, on this very day, he took that first photograph, and he must have marveled at it. And he kept marveling for all those years afterward. That seems like a pretty good life to me.