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The work of Wilson Bentley is a living testament to exploration, fascination, invention and making do with materials at hand. In anticipation of the approach of winter, one of my favorite seasons… and the arrival again of glorious white snow,  a truly amazing natural phenomenon, I am entranced by microscopic photographs by Wilson Bentley at the recent Paula Nadelstern exhibit. One is lucky to see even their form for a few moments until they melt in the heat of grasping fingers, but just one small snow crystal held up to the sun will reveal a formation uniquely orchestrated by the elements. The idea of thousands, millions of tiny geometric patterns created our of water that has shaped itself through low temperature and a combination of factors is profound.

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.

In general terms warmer temperatures produce rapidly developing crystals that are lacy, whereas lower temperatures will slow the growth of the patterned extenuation and produce denser concentric layers. If growing in isolation the formations of each crystal will tend to be more perfectly symmetrical. All the power of beauty is in the form, as the crystals are colour-less, teamed with the inclusion of streams of light through various densities of microscopic ice shafts, ridges and anomalies.

Schwerdtfeger Library has a vast selection of photomicrographs of snow crystals, prepared sets of glass lantern slides of dew, frost and ice crystals. This collection was amassed and donated to the library by The University of Wisconsin’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and many other collections exist like it in universities and study centers around the country.