YESTERDAY'S SNOW IS ALL GONE
MR. BENTLEY'S FEEL FOR THE SNOWFLAKE
Every child knows what a snowflake looks like when it is enlarged. Yet only a fraction know of the man whom we have to thank for the star-shaped form in our heads: Wilson Bentley succeeded for the first time in capturing the crystalline uniqueness of snow in a photograph in 1885. From then on, he made the study of frozen water his life's task. And he created his own poem of the weather.
Unique
Wilson Bentley's story begins like a winter fairy tale from New England in the 19th century: The son of a farmer from Jericho, Vermont, in the temperate north, caught snowflakes as a child and observed them with intense interest, while the other children from the village amused themselves tobogganing. At the age of 20, he succeeded in taking a shot of an enlarged crystal under the microscope. Bentley was ecstatic about its perfect form and amazed by its uniqueness. From then on, he stood outside his hut patiently looking up at the sky and collected the unique specimens falling down on a black tray. He brushed away unusable flakes and tried to apply the rest to photographic plates before they melted - which in those days required eight to ten seconds' exposure time. The yield was correspondingly low. Nonetheless, it was to increase in the following five decades, just as Bentley's frosty fever for ever new specimens with their completely inexhaustible patterns.
Artist, researcher, philosopher
1889 saw Bentley's first publication, namely in the magazine Popular Scientific Monthly. Others followed which made him known beyond American borders as "Snowflake Man". In his articles, Bentley repeatedly stressed the miracle of the uniqueness that he was researching: "Each snowflake", he wrote in 1922 in the magazine Popular Mechanics, "is full of unending beauty, which is magnified even further by the knowledge that the researcher will most probably never find another that is exactly the same." When he published his life's work in 1931, "Snow Crystals", which contained around 2,500 illustrations, he had studied more than 5,000 snowflakes. No two had been identical.
In his biography of Bentley, Snowflake Man, the meteorologist and long-time admirer of Bentley, Duncon Blanchard, portrays him as a "complex personality", as someone who boldly juggled photography, art and science, who was attached to the beautiful things in life and nature in diverse ways. Bentley's descriptions show evidence of a poetic tendency which would appear strange to every purely rational weather observer. Thus he wrote, "Every crystal was a masterpiece of design; […]. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost."
It is no wonder that at that time, the sensitive researcher of humanity wanted to show people more than just the empirical diversity of his transient finds. He also wanted to display the regularity and grace of his snowflakes. For this reason, he sat for nights at a time at the negatives of his photographs and, with a sharp knife and steady hand, scratched the film emulsion from the variegated crystal structure to show them off to their best advantage on a black background. Despite difficult finishing work, in Bentley's eyes his snowflake portraits never reach the same perfection as the originals. For him, they always remained a weak reflection of nature.
Icy reality
Thanks to his publications, for example, in magazines including the National Geographic, Bentley quickly became popular. However, his work found little recognition. His father and brother mocked his frosty passion, with which they believed Bentley was wasting his time. His neighbours talked about him, referring to him as a dreamy, although harmless, nutcase. And scientists ignored his publications assiduously. Obviously it was the contradictory combination of farmer and aesthete, of scientist and weather poet that led to people's disregard of Bentley. While other researchers considered him an eccentric dreamer, the uneducated population saw in him someone relentlessly possessed. And members of his own family considered him a useless bel esprit who should focus more on the fields outside his house. In short, Bentley had many talents, but as such, he was neither acknowledged nor a friend of the public. When, in 1921, a documentary film team approached Bentley, it swiftly brought the "Snowflake Man's" workplace out of the gloomy hut and into the bright daylight. There, Bentley, in a suit and tie instead of a padded overall, had to put on the elegant image of the arty photographer. However, the moustached bachelor would not let himself be forced into the one-dimensional cliché of the son of the muses permanently, even if he was a passionate piano, clarinet and violin player. On the outside, he remained true to science just as he did to the down-to-earth job of farmer.
Within his family, his mother was the only one who always supported her son's ambitions to become a researcher. Had she not had a microscope and not persuaded the father to buy a camera with a micro lens, Bentley would never have been in a position to immortalise the "delicate precision" of his "little jewels" - as Thomas Mann described snowflakes in "Der Zauberberg" ("The Magic Mountain").
His mother, a former teacher, taught her snow-loving son at home until he was 14 years old. Until then, he had never seen a school from the inside, meaning that he spent even more time inside his unheated hut, where, with painstaking fervour, he drew and mourned the fleeting beauty of every single one of his objects day after day.
(A study of precipitation
Throughout his whole life, Bentley was driven by the weather, even in the summer months when it does not snow. He noted down the weather conditions in Jericho consistently until his last entry on December 7, 1931. For six whole years, from 1898 to 1904, he devoted himself exclusively to rain by catching it in containers filled with flour. Using the depth of the impressions made, Bentley measured different drop sizes and compared them with each other. Correspondingly, one of the meteorological conclusions that he drew from this was that the main part of the rain that falls in a thunderstorm has to have come from snow. It was not until 17 years after his death that renowned scientists came to the same conclusions - using the same method. Seen in this light, Bentley's claims seem to have been way ahead of their time. This may also explain why his publications found no scientific recognition for years. The general disinterest in his studies of rain finally moved the weather poet to turn away from this form of precipitation. For the remaining 27 years of his life, he turned back to his original object of research and his great love, snow.)
Mortal precision
In 1889, Wilson Bentley wrote that the appearance of a snow crystal can "tell a great deal about how it has changed on its long journey through the clouds". Until today, weather researchers have not been able to understand the structural development of the forked hexagons. Perhaps the "Snowflake Man" would have made intelligent discoveries if he had not prematurely fallen victim to his own object of research only five months after the initial publication of his "Snow Crystals": Bentley died in November 1931 of the consequences of a lung infection which he got in a snowstorm.
"When water freezes, it reveals a beauty that had been hidden until then", according to chemist and author Dr. Philip Ball. Bentley furthered his work as artist and researcher in equal measure with the same romantic perspective. No-one else, either before or after him, succeeded in illustrating the complex design of snow with such precision. It is good that photographs do not melt.
ADD-ON
How does a snow crystal form?
Diversity of the unique specimens
Thanks to the pictures produced by crystal photographer Wilson Bentley, today we too see snow as one of the most fascinating forms of water. What first hovers in the upper atmosphere as water vapour, freezes below 0 degrees Celsius into granular shapes and finally falls from the clouds after the water droplets agglomerate into crystals. The temperature is decisive in determining the form of the individual snowflakes, which the Frenchman M. Guettard suspected as early as 1762. For although the basic design of a snowflake is always the same - a flat, hexagonal lattice of water molecules - this lattice accumulates H2O molecules in a very individual way according to temperature. Thus we see very different branching patterns when snowflakes fall to the Earth, from a jagged star to a needle-like hexagon.
Hexagonal insights
In the 1930s, the Japanese nuclear physicist Ukichiro Nakaya was the protagonist in the successful study of icy structures' abundance of shapes. Thanks to him, artificial snowflakes were able to be produced in a lab for the first time. Nakaya discovered, among other things, that complex, branching crystals are created in particularly damp air.
However, the basic hexagonal shape of the snowflake was discovered long before Nakaya's, Guettard's and Bentley's studies. It seems that Chinese scholars were talking about the symmetry, involving the number six, of the "snow flowers" as early as 135 BC. This metaphor is hardly surprising, for in pre-Christian China, the number six was considered the number of the element water. And in many regions of present-day China too, the number six, "liù", symbolises a smooth river of life which leads to advancement and prosperity, "lù".
Flaky puzzles
Two facts that even the Ancient Chinese observed in snow still puzzle contemporary meteorologists: On the one hand, the question remains unanswered as to why snowflakes grow flat, i.e., expand on only one level in our three-dimensional space. On the other hand, we still do not know how the symmetrical and coordinated development of the branching structure takes place. In his book, "Life's Matrix: A Biography of Water", Philip Ball presents two competing hypotheses relating to this. One of them suggests that it results from a pulsating and vibrating exchange of information between the arms as they develop, like an organ pipe. The other links the symmetry to spatial forces, with the consequence that all the branches grow at a similar speed and are optically largely identical.
