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Entries in Alwyn Bently (1)

Sunday
Jan232011

SNOWFLAKES: Wilson Alwyn Bentley. 

Bentley with snowflake camera. Bentley Collection. Scientist’s understanding of snow crystals owes a great debt of thanks to a 19 year old farmer living in Vermont in 1885 by the name of Wilson Alwyn Bentley. Fascinated by the snow crystals and their composition this man was the first person to successfully produce a photograph of snow or ice crystals. He did this by magnifying the crystals he gathered at 69 to 3,000 times on glass plates.

Bentley devised his own camera at a time when photography was raw, new and rare. He attached bellows to the microscope, along with wood splints, turkey feathers and a black board. Through the images he captured he discovered that every ice crystal is unique and grows symmetrically in a 6-sided hexagon around a tiny nucleus. Whether the growing shape from that nucleus becomes concentric or dendritic [branching] depends on various factors including temperature and water content.

Schwerdtfeger Library has a vast selection of photomicrographs of snow crystals, prepared sets of glass lantern slides of dew, frost and ice crystals

Capturing the snowflake: Wilson Alwyn Bentley 1865-1931 | Drawn Association

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