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"Offers valuable material not only to students of cryst...)
"Offers valuable material not only to students of crystallography but also to those of the arts." — The New York Times
Did you ever try to photograph a snowflake? The procedure is very tricky. The work must be done rapidly in extreme cold, for even body heat can melt a rare specimen that has been painstakingly mounted. The lighting must be just right to reveal all the nuances of design without producing heat. But the results can be rewarding, as the work of W. A. Bentley proved.
For almost half a century, Bentley caught and photographed thousands of snowflakes in his workshop at Jericho, Vermont, and made available to scientists and art instructors samples of his remarkable work. In 1931, the American Meteorological Society gathered together the best of these photomicrographs, plus some slides of frost, glaze, dew on vegetation and spider webs, sleet, and soft hail, and a text by W. J. Humphreys, and had them published. That book is here reproduced, unaltered, and unabridged. Over 2,000 beautiful crystals on these pages reveal the wonder of nature's diversity in uniformity; no two are alike, yet all are based on a common hexagon.
The introductory text covers the technique of photographing snow crystals, classification, the fundamentals of crystallography, and markings. There are also brief discussions of the nature and cause of ice flowers, windowpane frost, dew, rime, sleet, and graupel.
The book is of great value both to students of ice forms and for textile and other designers who can use the natural designs of these snow crystals in their work. Every photograph is royalty-free; you may use up to 10 without fees, permission, or acknowledgement.
"A most unusual and very readable book." — Nature
Snowflakes in Photographs (Dover Pictorial Archive)
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For almost a century, W. A. Bentley caught and photogra...)
For almost a century, W. A. Bentley caught and photographed thousands of snowflakes in his workshop at Jericho, Vermont, and made available to scientists and art instructors samples of his remarkable work. His painstakingly prepared images were remarkable revelations of nature's diversity in uniformity: no two snowflakes are exactly alike, but all are based on a common hexagon.
In 1931, the American Meteorological Society gathered the best of Bentley's photos and had them published; that work has long been available in a Dover reprint edition. The present volume includes a selection of 72 of the best plates (containing over 850 royalty-free, black-and-white photographs), carefully selected from that larger collection.
An inexhaustible source of design inspiration for artists, designers, and craftspeople, these graceful patterns are ideal for use in textile and wallpaper design, as well as a host of other creative projects. These images will also appeal to anyone intrigued by the intricacy and beauty of design in the natural world.
Wilson Alwyn "Snowflake" Bentley was the first known American photographer of snowflakes. He donated his collection of photomicrographs of snow crystals to the Buffalo Museum of Science.
Background
Wilson Bentley was born on Febreary 9, 1865, on the ancestral farm at Jericho, Vermont, United States, the youngest son of Thomas Edwin Bentley, a farmer, who died in 1886, and Fannie Eliza (Colton) Bentley, who lived until 1906. He remained on the farm all his life. Wilson had one brother, Charles F. Bentley, born June 9, 1863, who became the owner and successful manager of a farm near Andover, Vermont. One of his paternal great-grandfathers, Roger Stevens, served through the Revolutionary War.
Education
His formal education the little Wilson got at the public school of Jericho; but far better for him than any college degree was the love of the beautiful instilled into him by his mother, who taught him at home until he was fourteen.
Career
With the aid of a small microscope which Wilson’s mother had used as a school teacher she showed him how varied are the exquisite forms of the snowflake, and at once he became so fascinated that he began making pen-and-ink sketches of as many of them as he could. But the flakes were fleeting, the sketching tedious, and the results imperfect. His mother persuaded his father to buy him a camera and young Bentley soon constructed a crude device by which he could obtain enlarged photographs of snow crystals. This device in its essentials, in preference to anything more elaborate, he continued to use as long as he lived. Indeed, there was nothing that could take the place of his skill, patience, and good judgment as to what was worth picturing and preserving.
Gradually at first, and then rapidly, selections from these snow-crystal pictures appeared in newspapers, magazines, and books, both in the United States and abroad, many of them in the Monthly Weather Review of the United States Department of Agriculture. Artists and scientists, the world over, figuratively came to the one room in the old farmhouse in which during the last twenty years of his life Bentley lived alone, poor in worldly goods to the verge of distress, but rich beyond avarice in his vast and unique collection of snow-crystal pictures. Here he often dreamed of sometime giving to the world a handsome book of these pictures - only a vain fancy he then thought, but eventually fully realized only a few weeks before his death, and almost exactly fifty years from the time he had become interested in the snowflake as an object of exquisite beauty.
The book was made possible by the American Meteorological Society, with the aid of a subsidy by one of its fellows, H. E. Shaw, and the courage of a large publishing firm, McGraw-Hill. It bore the title Snow Crystals, and the text was supplied by William J. Humphreys. Bentley, who had had but little experience in writing and none at all in business and was of a timid nature, became rather alarmed at the proposed publication. Therefore, after furnishing the necessary pictures and being paid for them (he got no royalty, that going to the Meteorological Society) he knew nothing more of the book's progress until, in 1931, it was completed and a few presentation copies put into his hands. Here at last was the climax of all his long labors and the realization of his dreams. All his work was done, for in only a few days thereafter his end came, incident to an attack of pneumonia.
For fifty years practically his only interest was in picturing nature's water beauties-clouds, to some extent; dew; frost, on the window pane and in the open; and, above all else, the snow crystal in its myriad forms. For many years he worked on the farm, though for one year, 1885-1886, he taught music; but gradually more and more of his time, and for the last twenty years of his life all of it, was given to his hobby, a hobby that made him happy, however poor, and the artistic world forever fuller and richer.
Achievements
Wilson Bentley was one of the first who did photographs of snowflakes and fog with the help of self-made photomicrographs. He did more than 5, 000 images of crystals in his lifetime. Bentley published his works in magazines, including National Geographic, Nature, Popular Science, and Scientific American. Bentley also worked with William J. Humphreys of the U. S. Weather Bureau to publish Snow Crystals, a monograph illustrated with 2, 500 photographs.
