Rare snowflake photo gallery shared online by Natural History Museum
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One of the digital images of Wilson Bentley's snowflake photo book from the Natural History Museum
Have you ever heard the saying: no two snowflakes are the same?
A rare photograph album from the 1800s of around 355 pictures of snowflakes has been uploaded to the Natural History Museum's digital archive for people to view online.
The photographs were taken by Wilson Bentley, a meteorologist who lived in the US, and were donated to the Natural History Museum, in the UK in 1899.
"They are so incredibly beautiful," said Andrea Hart, a library special collections manager at the museum.
Who was Wilson 'Snowflake' Bentley?
Wilson loved snowflakes so much he was nicknamed Snowflake Bentley
Wilson was born in Vermont in the north-east of the US in 1865 into a family of farmers.
The area would get a lot of snow in the winter and he became fascinated by it.
His interest in science and snow grew and when he was around 15-years-old, his mother, a teacher, gave him a microscope.
Wilson would look at snowflakes close-up under the microscope, and try to draw them, but they would often melt before he had a chance to finish!
Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated.
A few years later, his father gave him a bellows camera, which he attached to his microscope, meaning he could take photographs of snowflakes.
He took his first picture on 15 January 1885, and became the first person to photograph a single snow crystal.
Wilson used a microscope and a camera to take photos of snowflakes.
Over the next 47 winters of his life, he took 5,381 photos of snow crystals using the same camera and microscope given to him by his parents.
He also wrote down information like how cold it was, and what direction the wind was blowing to see if it had any affect on the shape and size of the snowflakes.
Wilson loved snow, ice and other natural water formations so much it inspired him to take a job as a meteorologist - a scientist who studies the weather.
Some people even think that his photos inspired the tradition of people cutting snowflakes out of paper!
- Published11 February 2021
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