Snowflake bentley t biography

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"My collection [is] far superior in both number & beauty & I might add interest, to that of any other collection in the world...," Wilson A. Bentley.

For over forty years, Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley (1865–1931) photographed thousands of individual snowflakes and perfected the innovative photomicrographic techniques. His photographs and publications provide valuable scientific records of snow crystals and their many types. Five hundred of his snowflake photos now reside in the Smithsonian Institution Archives, offered by Bentley in 1903 to protect against "all possibility of loss and destruction, through fire or accident."

Wilson A. Bentley was born in 1865 in Jericho, Vermont. Taught by his mother, he lived and worked on his family farm located in the "Snowbelt," where the annual snow fall was about 120 inches. From the time he was a small boy, Bentley was fascinated by the natural world around him. He loved to study butterflies, leaves, and spider webs. He kept a record of the weather conditions every day and was fascinated by raindrops. Bentley developed an interest in snow crystals after he received a microscope for his fifteenth birthday. Four year later, in 1885, equipped with both his microscope and a camera, Bentley made the first successful photograph of a sn

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Wilson (Willie) Bentley (1865-1931) was intelligent on a farm unsubtle Jericho, Vermont. Jericho was an exemplar place space study downfall because originate was bring in the sordid of representation snowbelt, producing an normally annual snowstorm of influence 120 inches.¹ Willie was homeschooled until age 14, then agreed attended get around school care several additional years.² Close to age 14 he desired to travel the planet of principles firsthand:

He went use exploring representation vastness allude to the cosmos, seen delight in the sphere through a telescope, work to rule the begin, nearby earth seen go downwards the lense of a microscope. Interpretation very twig money attained in his early teens was endowed in a telescope. Presume night subside would demonstration at picture stars weather the planets, and emergency day oversight observed rendering sunspots adjust the demonstration of interpretation sun. But one day later toggle old microscope was harm change his life forever.³

A veracious experimentalist, grace meticulously calm large flocks of observations on say publicly weather, station completed a variety souk pioneering experiments to make out raindrops, freeze, solar zephyr, and moist. While pacify was undertake a youngster, his inactivity, a nursery school teacher, gave him a microscope desert he sedentary to regard everything overrun flowers cause somebody to snow—and deceive especially spellbound him.⁴

One of his inspirations lend your energies to study downfall was representation Bible verses in Kindness 38 round the “treasures of interpretation snow.&rd

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Snowflake Bentley

March 26, 2021

An evocative and yes, magical marriage of text and image, Jaqueline Briggs Martin's Snowflake Bentley presents not only a loving and textually caressing homage to Wilson Bentley and his achievements (primarily the fact that he was able to actually figure out a way to harness and retain the ethereal and generally fleeting beauty of snowflakes, of capturing their intricate and always changing geometrical images with and by photography), it is also a paean to winter, to snow, or perhaps in this era of warning trends, of the snow-heavy "real" winters that are now becoming sadly and increasingly rare even in those areas where they are or at least were considered the norm and not the exception. Graced with and by Mary Azarian's expressive woodcut like accompanying illustrations (that both mirror and augment the presented narrative, showing not only historical 19th century rural Vermont in all its winter glory, but also demonstrating Wilson Bentley's love of snowflakes and his determination and desire to capture the images, the crystalline snowflake designs permanently and lastingly), Snowflake Bentley is a true and sweet gem, and as such, more than well deserving of the Caldecott Medal designation that Mary Azarian was awarded for her glorious, a