The strange tale of the Snowflake Man

Using chilled velvet, tiny wood chips and turkey feathers, Wilson Bentley caused a flurry with his pioneering pictures of these miniature wonders. His results are astonishing – so why was he seen as an oddball outsider?

The structure of a snowflake is one of the most beautiful things in nature. Every flake is different, they say; each one an intricate lattice of frozen water molecules with spectacular symmetry. Everybody knows this. When children make paper snowflakes they cut them out to mirror this crystal magic.

But no one knows any of this intuitively. To the naked eye, snowflakes are just white dots. The universal image of them as wondrous crystalline formations is a product of microscopes, photography– and one man in Jericho, Vermont.

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