How One Man Proved No Snowflakes Are Alike

CNN shares the historic close-up snowflake photos of Wilson Bentley, the first person to capture the details of the individual "snow crystal" ice that makes up snowflakes. It was 1885, just 69 years after the invention of the camera, and after years of trial and error, "He went on to photograph more than 5,000 of these "ice flowers" during his lifetime - never finding any duplicates - and the images still mesmerize to this day."Every snow crystal shares a common six-sided or six-pointed structure - it's how frozen water molecules arrange themselves - but they will always vary from one another because each falls from the sky in its own unique way and experiences slightly different atmospheric conditions on its travel down to earth. Some of their arms may look long and skinny. Others may appear short and flat or somewhere in between. The possibilities are endless and fascinating.... "He had the mind of a scientist and the soul of a poet, and you can see that in his writings," said Sue Richardson, Bentley's great-grandniece who is vice president of the board for the Jericho Historical Society. "He wrote many, many articles over the years for scientific publications and for other magazines like Harper's Bazaar and National Geographic. "He also kept very detailed weather records and very detailed journals of every photograph that he took of a snow crystal - the temperature, the humidity, what part of the storm it came from. He kept very detailed information, and then these weather records that he kept and the theories that he developed about how snow crystals formed in the atmosphere, those were proven true...." It wasn't easy, however, to get those snow crystals on camera. It took almost three years, Richardson said, for Bentley to figure out how to successfully photograph one - which he did just a month shy of his 20th birthday. The first obstacle was figuring out how to attach the microscope to the camera. And then there was the challenge of getting each crystal photographed before it could melt away. "He worked in an unheated woodshed at the back of the house. He had to," Richardson said. "And the microscope slides, everything, had to be an ambient temperature or they'd melt" the crystal.... A children's book about him won the Caldecott Medal in 1999. Bentley never had formal education, according to his grandniece (who grew up hearing stories about this famous ancestor). One says that when Wilson Bentley was given an old microscope at age 15, "The first time he looked at a snow crystal under it, he was hooked. Just the beauty, the intricate detail. He was totally hooked."

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