The First Person to Ever Photograph a Snowflake

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As you know Jerry Bergman has taught science 45 years at University in subjects like biology, genetics, chemistry and biochemistry.

Anthropology, geology and microbiology is 9° in the field of science, including seven graduate and postgraduate degrees.

Dr. Bergman's you tell us the story of a teenage boy who became interested in snow.

January 15, 1885, 20 years of age he became the first person in the world. The photograph a snowflake is Dr. Bergman at the store while his background… In Vermont and a lot of snow there and he became interested in science and his parents are very supportive they even though they really couldn't afford it. They bought him things like a microscope camera so he could take pictures and among his many interests was the weather. He did teach actually charted the weather and try to correlate the weather with other events that he became especially interested in snowflakes Anchorage with a small magnifying glass.

He could see they look different and so he try to figure out what why are they different what's going on.

And of course the problem is a microscope requires light and light produces heat and heat melted snowflakes so had to come up with a way of getting it cold enough to get the snowflakes and examine them more quickly so he can get pictures without a snowflakes melting and he was finally able to do that. In fact, he was the first person ever to get a photograph of a snowflake and so that was quite a invention for a young boy. He was homeschooled by the way he did go to public school and his parents.

His mother was a teacher, so she was very supportive of his work so he was somewhat independent.

I guess his whole life's full name is Wilson or Willie.

They called his childhood named Bentley and his name often is seen called snowflake Bentley because he did so much work in this area and he wanted for the world of science firsthand and he saw God not only in the Scriptures, but he saw God in the natural world and as a result of his studying the natural world. He just realized he could learn a great deal about God to studying God's creation and once he noticed they were different. He wanted to photograph them because he felt that the glory of God can be revealed to snowflakes and of course people thought that was silly because come on the glory of God can be revealed to snowflakes.

This is silly, but he saw snowflakes as miracles of beauty and it seemed to him beauty of this should not be hidden it should be seen and appreciated by others talking to do that you can do that, basically by getting pictures and he when he photograph them. He realized that the key is the conditions can't be too cold because then the snowflakes are brittle it can be too warm because then the snowflakes melt and so therefore he really was a good experimentalist. He must've spent hours and hours and hours of failures and he realized that well this has to be done. He had things all set up to get pictures, something would happen. He didn't get a picture. He wasn't fast enough and so he had to work out his system so that he was able to accurately get snowflakes and once he did so he was able to photograph few, 10, 15, 20, and then after a while, he ended up with about 5000 snowflake images for the 46 years he worked on this and so he had a lot of pictures. One interesting thing is is that even I was a scientist never went to school. He was home educated candida publishing a similar leading science magazines in the world. He wrote the article on snow for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and that was quite a privilege in his day, and well today as well and then he eventually published a coffee size table book 6000 photographs title no crystals in the book was published by the leading publishers, McGraw-Hill and so this is quite a coup for a young man who is home school. He also published articles on snowflakes in popular mechanics magazine in the world's leading scientific magazine called nature Anacortes and the more common widely circulate magazines like the National Geographic in the 1923 and fortunately I have most of these magazine size able to look them up in the National Geographic in from our standards. Today they were good and beautiful but not to the quality that we can get today. Today the techniques are such really end up with incredibly gorgeous pictures of snowflakes.

I have four or five books, which illustrate this and you can see the beauty is there quite vividly and you can appreciate more than in his statement on the other hand, in his day and I seen a picture of a snowflake just astounded people and that's why he became his work became so popular. Another contribution he made which turned out to be very important was every snowflake is far as he could tell was different and he wondered why why they different and so he studied the process of the manufacturer. The production of snowflakes and realize they fall in certain conditions.

They move upward because of weather conditions so they moved up and down in the clouds, and after a while they end up being exposed in different amounts of heat and cold, and different conditions and that produces the variety that we see in snowflakes.

They discover they all have either six sides or three sides and now we understand part of the reason for the difference is because water molecules are not all the same. We have water molecule called deuterium which is called heavy water which is a bit different than most common water molecule and now this is a rare molecule as I found very commonly but each snowflake is made out of several hundred trillion water molecules and so even if we only have a few of these molecules that are deuterium.

We therefore end up with differences because of these few molecules because when you're talking about thousand million billion water molecules. Even if you have a million billion, then these group molecules such as deuterium produce differences and so he really did a lot of work in chemistry and physics, science and understanding. Specifically why there are so many snowflake differences and so therefore helps us appreciate the variety in nature and one thing you learn about nature when you study nature is there is an anonymous amount of variety everywhere in animals in Beatles.

One scientist said God has an inordinate fondness of Beatles because he made so many kind and I guess there six 7000 different kinds of Beatles and so therefore one thing we know, we look at the natural world is enormous variety everywhere, even in snowflakes and his inspiration again was to understand God's creation, you learn about God by studying his creation, which is true because you learn about an artist by studying his artwork. Learn about a musician by studying his music compositions.

We learn about God by studying his creation. Anacortes's creation would be the natural world and so I've course. My background is science.

So I agree that's true in many scientists that I know there motivation is to understand and learn about God.

And certainly we can see that was true in snowflake Bentley.

That's why I became fascinated with him because he's different.

He's not the usual person. He goes to college and gets his PhD in physics Corzine studies nature totally home grown and therefore he was original and wasn't constrained by the belief back then that you'll never photograph snowflakes because it just can't be done because the heat of the microscope he got a get light in there to see it and that light is heat and therefore that melt the snowflakes. He can't do it and he had a hard time at first he failed. I think for two or three years and he wasn't able to get one single photograph, but eventually he got thousands as Edison once said the key to invention is not creativity but simply perseverance.

Keep try and keep working on the local elementary school. I was asked to come in and do a presentation on snowflake only because they studied him in the school and so he still is ideas and his example still inspires young people today and a lot of children's books about him and so therefore it's a good example. A good example for all of us.

Great work is always my greater need for digging up the story and for producing the piece of the special functional Jerry Bergman for sharing the story of Wilson Willie Bentley dear our American stores