The January 2007 US Airways magazine had an article about Wilson Alwyn Bentley, the son of a farmer and an amateur photographer. In 1885, he was the first to photograph a single snowflake. They had a page of his photos. They were beautiful!
There's a children's book about his life, "Snowflake Bentley." I'll have to check it out. If it has his photos in it, I'm buying it.
Turns out, even though he wasn't a scientist, he was the first to propose the idea that no two snowflakes were alike. "And despite the great leaps in science and microphotography since Bentley's day, his astonishing assertion about the uniqueness of snow crystals has stood the test of time." The Jericho Historical Society has a museum with his original camera and microscopes, some of his original prints, and most of his original equipment. I think I should visit Jericho, VT.
"His glass slides now belong to the Buffalo Museum of Science in Buffalo, NY where they have been turned into a digital collection." I need to look for that online. I feel a really good math lesson coming. :-)
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I found the online stuff:
http://www.bentley.sciencebuff.org/
And I found this:
"The web site SnowCrystals.com presents this organizational scheme in its section “Classifying Snowflakes,” along with a visual representation."
How awesome that he had an organizational scheme. I knew I liked this guy! Don't you know that he would've loved to have had a database software?? :-)
2 comments:
Oh wow! I've read that book, the elementary school librarian read that to my class when we were in 3rd or 4th grade. It's a good book, and I want to say it won a Caldecott/Newberry award (whichever one is the illustration one)
Lindsay, You're so clever! What a great memory. Yes, the article mentioned that the book won a Caldecott Award in 1999.
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