Back
in the summer of 1919 a little, alert, middle-aged man 
appeared
in my office in Burlington and introduced himself as Wilson
A. Bentley, the snowflake man, and there began a friendship
that lasted until his death in 1931. Bentley was one of those
rare persons who could talk intelligently on almost any subject
for he was a voracious reader. His hobby of drawing snowflake
forms from observing them through a simple microscope as a boy
in his early teens grew to the taking of microphotographs and
was carried to such precision of technique that he became the
outstanding snowflake photographer of the world, with a world-wide
demand for his negatives, prints, and lantern slides. Bentley
never tried to work with his snowflake camera cexecpt in temperatures
from 20o to 25o Fahrenheit, out in a shed or lean-to, with the
camera pointed toward the sky through an open door, so that
the illumination would pass through the snow crystal. At the
time I visited his workshop in winter, he had stored a few tubfuls
of fresh snow from an overnight storm. He would slice off a
little of this snow with a shingle, brush off a few flakes with
a feather onto a little black tray, look at them hurriedly with
powerful reading glass to see if there were any worth photographing
(all the while holding his breath and holding everything almost
at arm's length). If any single flake on the tray looked interesting,
he would pick it up on a sliver of hard wood and press it against
a glass slide ready for the lens. All this was done in much
less time than it takes to tell it, and when the negative was
developed there was little, if any, indication of evaporation
or melting from the crystal.
It
was then that Bentley told me of a criticism of his work by
a German professor that had appeared in a scientific journal,
to the effect that Bentley's work was worthless because he retouched
his negatives to make them perfect and pretty. The German who
wrote the criticism had made "a great many microphotographs
of snowflakes" and ponderously declared "there is nosuch thing
as a perfect snowflake in nature." Bentley dismissed the criticism
with the laconic remark that "the Dutchman works so slow that
the corners all evaporate or melt off his snowflakes before
he gets his picture made." It was Bentley's pride that he never
touched a negative with a retouching pencil or "doctored" the
image in any way.
His work by that time had attracted the attention of the Central
Office of the Weather Bureau, and quite a large number of his
photographs were incorporated in a separate supplement to the
Monthly Weather Review, the Bureau's technical publication.
Bentley discussed with me the preparation of a book on the subject,
his idea being a small popular priced volume. He asked me to
collaborate with him, as he felt a bit diffident about the preparation
of the text to accompany his photographs. We went so far as
to prepare an outline for the book, but that is as far as it
ever went.
This dream of his life would never have been realized because
of the expense involved but for a generous gift for the purpose
through the National Geographic Society, which in turn was charged
with the responsibility of designating some person who could
help select and arrange the photographs and prepare a text that
would enhance the value of such a volume. It was here that the
invaluable services of Doctor W. J. Humphreys, of the Central
Office staff, appeared. Doctor Humphreys finally convinced Mr.
Bentley that he should bring out a more elaborate book, concentrating
his energies and his best work in this manner. Doctor Humphreys
wrote the text, helped Bentley with the classification and arrangement
of some two thousand of his best photographs out of a collection
of approximately five thousand, found a publisher --- and the
book was on the presses of the McGraw-Hill Book Company when
Bentley died.
My first visit to his place out on the Jericho farm was by special
invitation
during the trout season. He walked me about fifteen miles through
meadows and brook beds until I lost my enthusiasm for the sport
and haven't fished since. But we caught enough of legal size
to cook for supper after we returned to the farmhouse, where,
with an interested listener, Bentley waxed eloquent about his
hobby, explaining his procedure and showing me literally hundreds
of his choicest prints. I still have a few that he gave me that
day.
He had a lattice below his front porch decorated with snowflake
patterns, and several large ones, three or four feet in diameter,
fastened up on the side of his barn. He also had a collection
of quartz and other crystals of geologic interest displayed
on a special bench in his front yard.
The house was a rather large as farmhouses go in the back country
of Vermont, and he, a confirmed bachelor, lived alone in one
wing, while the rest of the house was occupied by a nephew and
his family. The room was about fifteen feet square, containing
an old-fashioned wood-burning cookstove, a few plank-bottom
chairs, a common drop-leaf table, of which he used one side
as a desk, and a beautiful-toned piano. The room communicated
by a narrowish passageway with the woodshed in the rear where
he kept his micro-camera mounted throughout the year. This micro-camera
was a combination of microscope and ordinary bellows view camera
which he had rigged up himself in the crudest sort of manner,
the focusing device being operated by spools and strings.
His workroom and the passageway had the effect of everything
that had been discarded or not at the moment being used simply
having been pushed aside. Papers and bulletins lay in a circle
around the table where they had fallen off onto the floor when
he pushed them back to make room for the current occupation.
Winter clothing and footgear so filled the corners of the passageway
that one had to walk carefully to avoid treading on mackinaw
or stumbling over a rubber boot. He would not allow his nephew's
wife in his wing of the house; said he could never find anything
if he once turned her loose in there!
He was a brilliant pianist (taught music in his younger days)
and the keyboard showed an arc from treble to bass where his
fingers in playing had cleared the dust from the keys, while
beyond the reach of his fingers the dust was banked between
the black keys and into the corners. Yet he would go about the
room with perfect aplomb, as though his housekeeping were immaculate,
picking choice prints from windowsills or mantel or piano top,
or if the fancy struck him, sitting down to play some brilliant
classic or modern song hit --- he seemed to have them all at
his fingertips, notwithstanding the fact that his hands were
calloused and gnarled from farm labor, for a dairy farm and
sugar orchard were prime sources of income until the end.
The end came because of his enthusiasm for what he called his
lifework. Returning from a lecture engagement, against strenuous
insistence and advice of those who would gladly have entertained
him, he went home through a severe snowstorm, in December 1931
and the exposure that night caused his death from pneumonia.
He "had to go home because the storm was the type that yielded
a certain sort of snow crystal that he wanted!"
Another sidelight on the character of Friend Bentley was that
for a number of years he offered the hospitality of his farm
to the "fresh-air children" from New York City, and summer after
summer the same children would come back to him.
*Excerpted from: Hartwell, Frank E., 1958. Forty Years
of the Weather Bureau The Transition Years. Hand set and printed
by the author at Long Trail Studios, Bolton, Vermont.
[NOAA
Central Library Call Number QC875 U7 H38 1958]
