Meet The Man Known As,

Snowflake Bentley, 

 a self educated farmer, Wilson A. Bentley, (1865-1931), attracted world attention with his pioneering work in the area of photomicrography, most notably his extensive work with snow crystals (commonly known as snowflakes), by adapting a microscope to a bellows camera, and years of trial and error, he became the first person to photograph a single snow crystal in 1885,

 He would go on to capture more than 5000 snowflakes during his lifetime, not finding any two alike, His snow crystal photomicrographs were acquired by colleges and universities throughout the world and he published many articles for magazines and journals including, Scientific American and National Geographic,

 in 1885, at the age of twenty, Wilson Alwyn Bentley, a farmer who would live all his life in the small town of Jericho in Vermont, gave the world its first ever photograph of a snowflake,

 throughout the following winters, until his death in 1931, Bentley would go on to capture over 5000 snowflakes, or more correctly, snow crystals, on film,

 despite the fact that he rarely left Jericho, thousands of Americans knew him as The Snowflake Man or simply Snowflake Bentley, even after years of practice, this post-production process often took as long as four hours for a complex snow crystal,

 although his father thought Wilson’s snow photography a lot of nonsense and not the proper thing for a farmer to do, Wilson broke unique ground in the early days of modern meteorology as well as microscopic photography, His biographer, cloud physicist Duncan Blanchard, dubbed him “America’s First Cloud Physicist”, the Burlington Free Press wrote in a Christmas Eve obituary for Bentley: 

Longfellow said that genius is infinite painstaking. John Ruskin declared that genius is only a superior power of seeing. Wilson Bentley was a living example of this type of genius. He saw something in the snowflakes which other men failed to see, not because they could not see, but because they had not the patience and the understanding to look,

Bentley gave us the saying, 'no two snowflakes are alike, and where did the famous saying come from? here is the quote, “Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated., When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.” – Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley 1925.