Wilson Alwyn "Snowflake" Bentley (February 9, 1865 – December 23, 1931), born in Jericho, Vermont, is the first known photographer of snowflakes. He perfected a process of catching flakes on black velvet in such a way that their images could be captured before they either melted or sublimated.
Bentley was born in February in 1865. He first became interested in snow crystals as a teenager on his family farm. He tried to draw what he saw through an...
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Wilson Alwyn "Snowflake" Bentley (February 9, 1865 – December 23, 1931), born in Jericho, Vermont, is the first known photographer of snowflakes. He perfected a process of catching flakes on black velvet in such a way that their images could be captured before they either melted or sublimated.
Bentley was born in February in 1865. He first became interested in snow crystals as a teenager on his family farm. He tried to draw what he saw through an old microscope given to him by his mother when he was fifteen. The snowflakes were too complex to record before they melted, so he attached a bellows camera to a compound microscope and, after much experimentation, photographed his first snowflake on January 15, 1885.
He would capture over 5,000 images of crystals in his lifetime. Each crystal was caught on a blackboard and transferred rapidly to a microscope slide. Even at subzero temperatures, snowflakes are ephemeral because they sublimate. Bentley's work can be seen as occupying the...
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