Back When? 1885 Vermont Farmer Photographs First-Ever Ice Crystal Images With Microscope

He was a humble farmer. Land costed $3 an acre in 1880 when the 15-year-old Wilson Bentley first dreamed of attaching a new big bellows camera to the microscope his mother had given him. His hopes were to photograph the snowflakes he was observing through magnification. The problem was the camera costed $100, a king’s ransom in those days, and no farmer in Vermont who had any practical sense would spend so wastefully, according to Bentley’s great-grandniece Sue Richardson. “One hundred dollars represented 33 acres of prime farmland to his father, who was a farmer and was not inclined to spend that kind of money,” Ms. Richardson, 67, said. “It was actually an inheritance in 1881 from his mother’s parents that provided the money,” she said. The laboratory young Bentley had already set up for studying his microscopic curiosities would soon serve as a photographer’s studio. Not exactly a lab, it was a shack, and had no heat. But young Bentley was used to weathering the harsh Vermont winters—which he often spent catching snowflakes on dark-colored fabric and then trying to sketch them on paper. On January 15, 1885, after s after finally finding a pinhole small enough not to overexpose his fragile apparatus, Mr. Bentley successfully took the world’s first snow crystal photograph. Stories told to Ms. Richardson by her grandma speak of the young man wanting to fall to his knees to worship that big bellows for making his dream possible, after three long years of trial and error. Despite his being uneducated, he would also become a sought-after source of meteorological knowledge and, begrudgingly, a wellspring of intuitive wisdom for the scientific community, who had done their best to ignore him, until they couldn’t. But above all, his simply sublime snowflake photos spoke volumes. Almost magical to behold, they were something the world had never laid eyes on before. Soon, he was being sought out by big museums and publications. “He was being published in these scientific magazines, and National Geographic, and everything,” Ms. Richardson said. “Colleges and universities all over the world were writing to him, wanting to buy copies of his negatives for teaching purposes.” His antiquated contraption somehow had revealed in fine detail the intricate patterns and designs of nature in winter with a clarity exceeding today’s technology, she told a local newspaper. “The photographs today are different, they’re more three-dimensional where his were more two-dimensional,” she said, calling Bentley a man “far ahead of his time.” “He sold them for 5 cents a piece. Which was exactly what it cost him to make a duplicate,” she said. “He never raised his price, because it was never about money. For him, it was about sharing this beautiful gift with the world.” Bentley was seen as an outsider by people in his hometown, who thought he was crazy. Snow was worthless to a farmer in Jericho; it would neither add to your crop yield nor make your cows produce more milk. But his eventual 5,381 snowflake portraits comprising his lifework would be celebrated by many others. Tiffany’s bought a set from him for their jewelry designs. Harper’s women’s magazine also featured his work. Thanks to the Boston Globe, he famously became the “Snowflake Man.” His theories of how snowflakes formed in the atmosphere were influential, and he invented a way to measure the size of a raindrop using a pan and flour that is still used today.