RANDOM THOUGHTS: A biblical snow?

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January 29, 2009

By Dorothy Brush / dcb1@frontier.net The Crossville Chronicle Thu Jan 29, 2009, 04:05 PM CST

Last week we had our first real snowfall of the season and I remembered the ditty kids in elementary school chanted, “Snow, snow beautiful snow, step on a hunk and away you go!” An unknown poet used the words of a more serious minded child to describe snow. “Little white feathers filling the air, how came you there?” From afar came the answer, “We came from the cloud-birds flying so high, shaking their white wings up in the sky.”

In plain, simple language, snow is the solid form of water which grows while floating through the air. To those blessed with inquiring minds, snow has always been an intriguing subject. In the book of Job, snow is mentioned twice: in 37:6, “For He saith to the snow, be thou on the earth," and in 38:22, “Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?” Perhaps those words inspired an archbishop in Sweden in 1555. He wrote in a book on natural phenomenon of the crystal form of snowflakes. In 1665, an Englishman used the new microscope to study snowflakes. By the mid 19th century, snow crystals appealed to poets. A book, Cloud Crystals, appeared in 1864 which was filled with fancy but also scientific fact and even woodcuts showing some of the basic forms of snow. The author of this book was "A Lady." It was not until 1951 that a classification of frozen precipitation was published which showed that although snowflakes are generally hexagonal there are variations.

On Feb. 9, 1885, a boy was born on a farm in Jericho, VT. Wilson A. Bentley was home-schooled by his school teacher mother and taught farming by his father. A curious child, he was very aware of the wonders of nature as he worked in the fields. Living in Vermont, he was exposed to plenty of snow and to this sensitive youngster snowflakes were “tiny miracles of beauty” and ice crystals were “ice flowers.”

He was 15 when he used a microscope to try to view a snowflake. Frustrating as it was to watch them melt quickly, he kept experimenting. Bentley decided he needed a camera if he were to be able to share with others what he saw with the microscope. His practical father thought a camera was too expensive a toy, but eventually his mother prevailed, and at age 17, Bentley had a camera and a new microscope. More experimentation followed, but by the next year, he had his first photo of a snowflake. Pictured on blue velvet the effect was stunning. At age 19, he made the world’s first photomicrograph of a snow crystal by fitting a bellows camera with a compound microscope.

In Jericho, the folks considered Bentley odd and they called him “Snowflake Man.” In truth he was a thoughtful, gifted, intuitive, self-taught budding scientist. In addition, he was a talented musician and played piano, organ, clarinet, coronet, violin and even composed music for the community marching band.

His peers acknowledged his accomplishments in 1920 by electing him a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. Bentley continued his lonely quest to convince others of his theory that no two snowflakes were alike and at age 33 he began publishing articles. Snow Crystals, a book featuring many of his photomicrographs, was published in 1931.

During his lifetime, he filled nine notebooks with his observations and analysis of his weather observations over a 47-year period. He left 5,381 snowflake images which he did not copyright. Today, a science center at Johnson State College in Vermont is named in his memory. The Snowflake Man died of pneumonia in 1931 brought on by walking through a blizzard.

Dorothy Copus Brush is a Fairfield Glade resident and Crossville Chronicle staffwriter whose column is published each Wednesday. She may be reached at dcb1@frontiernet.net.

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