Five Beautiful Things

No Two Alike

Perspective is everything. When viewed from afar, fallen snow appears as a blanket of white across the landscape, either charming or frustrating us. We shovel its weighty chunks into ditches, shape it into sculptures on our front lawns or make playful weapons from it in the form of balls. It boggles the mind, then, that no two of the billions of snowflakes that make up this mass of frozen white precipitation is identical.

Wilson Bentley, a Vermont farmer, was the first person to ever photograph individual snowflakes. An amateur photographer and science enthusiast, Bentley endeavored to capture images of snowflakes beginning in 1885 after rigging up a microscope to a bellows camera. He isolated individual snowflakes by carefully placing them on a glass slide mounted against a black piece of cloth. The effect is stunning. He photographed more than 5000 snowflakes in his lifetime and no two are alike. What is even more astounding is the mathematical symmetry in each of the snowflakes. These are not just shapeless blobs falling from the sky; snowflakes are clusteres of tiny, finely crafted crystals clinging together as they fall to earth.

Bentley’s project became so successful that he published a book of his photographs in 1931 called Snow Crystals. Scientists were so assured of the accuracy of his photographic evidence that no one bothered to study snowflakes professionally for more than 100 years; Bentley’s work was so extensive and so meticulously archived that there was simply no need.

 

Below are five of Bentley’s photographs of snowflakes, taken between 1885 and 1900. The next time you catch a snowflake on your mitten, look closely: you may just discover a rare and icy gem that is never to be recreated.