Everything's Coming up Snowflakes by Karla Stover

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Jericho is a little town of about 5,000 in central Vermont. It’s the kind of place where folks photograph the Truman Galusha House built in 1790 or the Old Red Mill and Mill House built in 1856 or to visit the Snowflake Bentley Gift Shop. Yes, an entire gift shop devoted to snowflakes.

First off, let’s make sure that we’re talking about the feathery ice crystal, typically displaying delicate six-fold symmetry and not the autumn-blooming Eurasian flower. Now that we’ve clarified that, let’s look at how the giftshop began.

Three steps were required. First: on February 9, 1865, with the birth of a baby named Wilson Alwyn Bentley. Second: on his 11th birthday, when his mother let him look at a snowflake though an inexpensive microscope. Third: when Wilson was given a compound microscope and camera for his 20th birthday, thanks to his mother because his father thought (and did so for all of his life) that it was an unnecessary extravagance.)

After that, and every winter for the next 50 years Wilson set his equipment up in an unheated shed, and as soon as the first flake fell began to capture/record them on glass plates. When a storm started, he stood in the shed's open doorway and caught snowflakes on a smooth, black-painted, square foot board which he held by wire handles. Then he carried the board inside, examined the crystals through a magnifying glass, and brushed the damaged ones away with a feather, all the while holding his breath so as to not melt one. The perfect ones he transferred to glass slides. Finally, with the camera pointed toward a window, he took each picture through the microscope with the light passing through the snowflake which became magnified from 64 to 3,600 times its size. The process involved an apparatus consisting of wheels, ropes, and other odds and ends. Exposure ranged from ten to 100 seconds. The last steps were to treat the plates to a fixing bath and then wash the plate in the ice cold water of his backyard spring.

Wilson divided his snowflakes into origins of high or low altitude. It was his opinion that low altitude flakes had the most beautiful designs.

During his lifetime, Wilson  captured and preserved some 6,000 snow "crystals." He contributed articles to The Annual Summary of the Monthly Weather Bureau Review, had his photographs used in science classes, included in encyclopedias, and numerous magazines. Artists and jewelers found and find inspiration in them. Three weeks before his death on December 23, 1931, Snow Crystals, his magnum opus prepared in collaboration with Dr. W.J. Humphreys of the U.S. Weather Bureau was published.