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19th-Century Photographer Captured 5,000 Snowflakes
tcd004 writes "Wilson Bentley began photographing snowflakes in 1885, and managed to immortalize more than 5,000 crystals before his death in 1931. Now his images are widely recognized and highly sought after. At the age of 19, 'Snowflake' Bentley jury-rigged a microscope to a bulky bellows camera and took the first-ever photograph of a snowflake. Photography then, particularly microphotography, was much closer to science than art. In a 1910 article published in the journal Technical World, he wrote, 'Here is a gem bestrewn realm of nature possessing the charm of mystery, of the unknown, sure richly to reward the investigator." The video embedded at the link above touches on another long-forgotten piece of history: a sketch of the photographers who captured arial views of assemblages of tens of thousands of soldiers returning from WW-I, carefully choreographed and arranged to form a Liberty Bell, a Stature of Liberty, a US flag... as forgotten as the origin of the WW-I term razzle-dazzle.
Sayeth thy worst to this befuddled reader of text.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Ariel: A character in "The Tempest". Also "The Little Mermaid".
Aerial: existing or living or growing or operating in the air
Arial: A font from Monotype.
Ninnle was able to do so much, even back then.
Ninnle Linux...the choice of a Ninnle generation.
Follow the "snowflakes" link and look at the bottom of the page:
Copyright/Public domain works
Wilson Bentley did not copyright his photographs and thus they are in the public domain and free to use for any purpose.
HOWEVER
No materials or images from this (or any other) website may be resold in any form (print or electronic).
The Public Domain status does not give you the right to resell material unless you have access to the original source and permission from the owner to reproduce the material. Any published works of Public Domain material is only "Royalty free" if explicitly stated.
WTF? Someone just doesn't understand what Public Domain really is.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Maybe tomorrow we can hear about Charles Dickens.
i always thought the term was jerry rigged, but maybe its regional.
The appropriate term you're looking for is "MacGyver'd".
For those wondering how wild colors and stripes on ships would hide them from U-Boats -- it didn't. It made it hard for the U-Boat captains to properly evaluate their targets. The colors and pattern would disrupt the length, angle, and speed clues seen though binoculars at a distance, and through the periscope when preparing to fire torpedoes.
Radar didn't exist during WWI, so U-Boats cruised on the surface with lookouts who could eyeball ships or ship smoke at 10 miles, maybe 20 on a good day. Given their 15-18 knot surface speed and 6-8 knot submerged speed, the U-Boat now had only 30 minutes or so to get into proper position ahead of the approaching ship -- about 4000-6000 yards (2-3 nautical miles) ahead and to one side of the approaching target. WWI German torpedoes could travel 6600 yards at 36 knots, for a max run time of just over 5 minutes. A target ship moving at 12 knots would move 400 yards in a minute. A 600 foot ship travels it's length in only 30 seconds. It's this tiny window that the Razzle-Dazzle would screw up. If the U-Boat captain guessed wrong on the ships movement due to painted false bow waves and extra bow/stern lines, the firing solution would be bad.
Remember that the ship view from the U-Boat was usually against cloudy skies of some sort in the North Atlantic. Add in the blue haze with distance, and the yellows, purples, and pinks start to blur into the background blue-gray sky. Now think of that sight through a wet periscope a few feet above the water, and you get the idea.
WWII had a brilliant camoufalge example in the bizarre sounding Pink Spitfires used for reconnaissance. The pink shade was selected to blend against the just-past-sunset twilight sky and clouds when those aircraft flew, and it was very effective.
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
I'm wondering who this advertiser thinks they're going to make money off of here at slashdot. /. homepage.
Just saw it to the right of the
It would have been nice to see how they looked.
As a photographer, I've been a fan of Snowflake Bentley for a long time.
His contemporary counterpart is Ken Libbrecht.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Gallileo said "I'm only as good as those shoulders I've stood on before,"
which nearly had me rolling around on the floor laughing.
I think he's trying to reference Newton's statement "If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."
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Two Books by Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley:
Snowflakes in Photographs
Snow Crystals
Three books about Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley:
The Snowflake Man: A Biography of Wilson A. Bentley
My Brother Loved Snowflakes: The Story of Wilson A. Bentley, the Snowflake Man
Snowflake Bentley
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It's said that no flake is equal to another, which is amazing de per se.
But I'm intrigued by the constant symmetry.
I can understand crystals and why they form natural patterns, like prisms or cubes, but given that everyone is different why an arm (or leg) is equal to the other? Maybe they form together (hence they grow identical) and then split somehow?
Any geologist or spelunker in the room?
I don't really think Snowflake Bentley has been "long forgotten", as the summary implies. Our homeschooled children just finished a unit study on him a few weeks ago (which doesn't prove anything of course except that he's still well known enough for there to be unit studies made available on him...).
In fact, a book about him, appropriately titled Snowflake Bentley won the Caldecott medal as recently as 1999!
It is.
The video embedded at the link above touches on another long-forgotten piece of history: a sketch of the photographers who captured arial views of assemblages of tens of thousands of soldiers returning from WW-I, carefully choreographed and arranged to form a Liberty Bell, a Stature of Liberty, a US flag... as forgotten as the origin of the WW-I term razzle-dazzle.
Fans of old photos should look up the classic survey of the San Francisco earthquake, which were taken by kite-borne cameras.
Oh, and Linux fans will want to check out S.S. War Penguin at the razzle-dazzle link.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
A microphotograph is a very small photo. Like the micro dots spys used to send under postage stamps or the flaps of envelopes. A photomicrograph is a photo taken through a microscope. I think he took photomicrographs or micrographs.
Bentley donated the original glass plates to the Buffalo Museum of Science (a city known for snow itself, though Bentley did most of his work in Vermont as far as I know). They have many of them scanned, and include data about each photo as well. See it here.
I'm from Buffalo and have been to the museum countless times; after learning about Bentley I am always amazed that they don't capitalize on it with some sort of exhibit. Seems like it would be a nice attraction to a museum that otherwise seems to be having trouble encouraging attendance and keeping up the collections.
No doubt this material would have been of enormous use to poor Dr Max Box and his quest for two identical snowflakes.