Pages 273-274:

Wilson Alwyn Bentley

“Jericho, Vermont, has one industry, if such it may be called, that gives it a unique place and that has carried the name of the town all over the world.” With justifiable pride, the co-editors of The History of Jericho, Vermont described their debt to Wilson Bentley, “The Snowflake Man” of Jericho, who became known to thousands of readers of popular technical and photographic magazines during the opening years of the twentieth century. Yet several decades passed before the academic profession in the United States and throughout the world came to appreciate the significance of Bentley’s investigations of the physical nature of precipitation that he carried on at his farm in a remote location in northern Vermont where he was born and died. Today his pioneer researches into the mysteries of raindrop and snowflake formation have accorded him the title of “America’s First Cloud Physicist.”

When still a youth, Bentley took his first photomicrograph of a snowflake during a storm on January 15, 1885. For the next thirteen years, while working quietly by himself, he took about 400 photomicrographs of ice crystals. Through the interest of Professor George Perkins of the University of Vermont, the first article describing and illustrating his work appeared in 1898 in Appleton’s Popular Scientific Monthly. During the seven years from 1898 to 1904, Bentley made 344 measurements of the size of raindrops by a method of his own invention, in addition to carrying on his work with snowflakes. In 1904, the results of his work were published in the Monthly Weather Review of the United States Weather Bureau. The article was described as “an incredible paper which on the basis of ingenuity and number of new ideas is perhaps unmatched in the world’s scientific writings on raindrops and raindrop phenomena” by his recent biographer, Professor Duncan Blanchard of the State University of New York at Albany.*

In 1924, the first research grant ever awarded by the American Meteorological Society was given to Bentley for “40 years of extremely patient work.” Bentley was never much concerned with money or its acquisition. In 1926, this was made clear with his statement: “From the practical standpoint I suppose I would be considered a failure. It has cost me $15,999 in time and materials to do the work and I have received less than $4,000 for it.” The meager income came mostly from payments for articles and from the sale of slides of his photomicrographs, mainly to schools and museums.

Though recognition of his genius came late in life, Bentley’s name is now known throughout the scientific world as a result of the publication of Snow Crystals in 1931 by McGraw-Hill Book Company of New York City. Nearly 2,500 photographs of the some 4,500 that Bentley collected were reproduced. A new paperback edition was issued in 1962, so great was the demand not only in scientific circles, but by all interested in the delicate patterns of nature’s beautiful art.


* Weatherwise.


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