The Inspiring Story of Snowflake Bentley (a special story for Cora)

Angela O'Dell (0:13)

Hey, everyone, it's Angela O'Dell. Welcome to Real Cool History for Kids. Are you guys ready to join the adventure? Let's go.

Can you do a podcast on Snowflake Bentley? Absolutely, Cora. Hey, guys, this is episode 190 of Real Cool History for Kids. And the story that Cora has requested is so amazing. And it is one that brings back so many wonderful memories for me. So pull up a chair and let me tell you the story of Snowflake Bentley.

Have you ever caught a snowflake on your mitten? If you live somewhere that gets snow like I do, you have probably watched thousands of snowflakes fall from the sky.

Maybe you've even tried to catch one on your tongue, or maybe you've built a snowman or made a snow fort. Or if you're like me, maybe you have stood at a window on a snowy day and watched the whole world slowly turn white. But have you ever stopped to look very, very closely at just one snowflake? Well, more than 150 years ago, a little boy in Vermont did exactly that. And what he saw would eventually become his life's work. His name was Wilson Bentley, but the world would eventually know him by a much more fitting name, Snowflake Bentley. Wilson Bentley was born on February 9th, 1865 in Jericho, Vermont. If you have a map of the United States nearby, see if you can find Vermont. It is a small state in the northeastern part of the country, right next to New York and just south of Canada. And Vermont gets snow. Lots and lots of snow. The area where Wilson grew up could receive around 120 inches of snow in a year. That is 10 feet of snow. For most of us, that sounds like quite a bit of snow, right? Well, my sister lives in southeast Alaska, and they get way more snow than this. So much snow. Wilson lived with his family on a farm, and from the time he was young, he was fascinated by the natural world around him. He studied leaves and spider webs and butterflies and raindrops, and he even kept record of the weather. But there was something about snow that especially fascinated him. When Wilson was a teenager, his mother gave him a microscope. Suddenly, he could look at the tiny things around him in a completely different way and then he put a snow crystal underneath it. Wow. Imagine being Wilson at that moment. Something that looked like a tiny white speck falling from the sky suddenly became an incredibly detailed crystal. There were branches and points and delicate patterns. Wilson looked at more snow crystals and then more and more. He wanted to preserve what he was seeing, so at first he tried to draw them. There was just one problem though, and you probably guessed it, right? Snowflakes melt. Wilson would begin drawing one of the most beautiful snowflakes he had ever seen. And what happened? Well, he couldn't catch all of the details before it disappeared. Can you imagine just how frustrating that must have been? Wilson needed a way to freeze the snowflakes in time. Not like literally freeze them because they were already frozen, right? No, he needed to preserve its image and that gave him an idea. What if he could take a photograph through his microscope? Today, we can pull out a phone and just take 100 photographs in a few minutes, right?

But Wilson Bentley couldn't do that. Photography in the 1800s required large cameras and glass photographic plates and careful preparation and long exposure time.

And Wilson wanted to use that technology to photograph something tiny enough to sit on the end of his finger, something that melted very quickly, a snow crystal. This was going to be very difficult. When Wilson was 17, his parents bought him a large camera. It was expensive for a farm family, but Wilson was determined to make it work. He experimented with connecting the camera to his microscope, and then he tried photographing snow crystals.

But he failed. So he tried again. And he failed again. And again. And again. For years, Wilson experimented. He refused to give up. Remember, every snowflake he worked with could disappear with just a little warmth. His equipment had to stay cold. So he worked outside in the freezing Vermont winter. When snow fell, Wilson would catch crystals and carefully move them with a feather. Then he would position one underneath his microscope. Imagine trying to do that while you're standing outside in the cold. He had to work carefully and quickly. And he had to figure out how to get enough light through the microscope and into his camera to make clear photograph. Finally, on January 15th, 1885, when Wilson Bentley was 19 years old, it happened. He successfully photographed a single snow crystal. It was the first successful photograph of an individual snow crystal ever made. Just think about that for a minute. People had seen snowflakes for centuries, right? But Wilson Bentley had found a way to capture that tiny, tiny little crystal with all its tiny details in a photograph so that it could be studied long after the crystal itself had melted away. Once Wilson succeeded, he did not stop. He kept photographing snow year after year after year.