Wilson Bentley
Wilson Alwyn Bentley (born February 9, 1865 in Jericho , Vermont , † December 23, 1931 ) was an American farmer, photographer and snow researcher.
Life
Bentley, whose main occupation is a farmer on his family farm in the USA, was one of the first people to photograph snow crystals under a microscope on January 15, 1885 - around six years after Johann Heinrich Ludwig Flögel . He had developed the procedure for this himself. In total, he photographed more than 5,000 snow crystals. His book Snow Crystals , published in 1931, contains more than 2,400 of his photos. He bequeathed the photo plates to the Buffalo Museum of Science .
In a 1922 contribution, Bentley put forward the thesis that every snow crystal is shaped differently (“ no two snowflakes are alike ”). To this end, he referred to his previous observations of always different crystals, which of course did not yet provide positive evidence that all snow crystals must really be different. Nancy Knight, a snow researcher from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder , Colorado, published photos of two apparently completely identical snow crystals in a 1988 article.
The Bentley Crag , a cliff in the Antarctic, is named in his honor . In 2013, Titus Müller wrote the story “Der Schneekristallforscher” about him.
Works
- Jean M. Thompson, illustrated by Wilson A. Bentley: Water Wonders Every Child Should Know . Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City 1913
- Wilson A. Bentley: The Guide to Nature . 1922
- Wilson A. Bentley: The Magic of Snow and Dew . National Geographic 1923.
- Wilson A. Bentley, William J. Humphreys: Snow Crystals . McGraw-Hill, New York 1931
- N. Knight: No two alike? In: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society , 69 (5), 1988, p. 496
Web links
- Short biography
- January 15, 1885: Farmer Wilson Bentley succeeds in taking the first photograph of a snowflake . ( RTF ; 8.2 kB; 2 pages) SWR2 Zeitwort, January 15, 2008
- Fabienne Hurst: Flake photographer Wilson Bentley - photographed ice cold . one day ; biographical report
References and comments
- ↑ In the meantime, there is evidence that this was previously the lawyer and astronomer Dr. Johann Heinrich Flögel (1834–1918) from Ahrensburg succeeded on February 1, 1879 - Source: Who owns the first photo flake? In: Schleswig-Holsteinische Landeszeitung , February 13, 2010 (among others)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bentley, Wilson |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bentley, Wilson Alwyn (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American photographer and snowflake researcher |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 9, 1865 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Jericho , Vermont |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 23, 1931 |
| Place of death | Jericho , Vermont |