Wilson Alwyn Bentley lived all his life, from 1856 to 1931, on a farm in Jericho, Vermont, where an average of 120 inches of snow falls each winter. Wilson liked snow so much that he spent his whole life studying it, and because of this, everyone in Jericho called him Snowflake Bentley.
His mother managed to buy him an inexpensive microscope, through which he looked closely at flowers, rocks… and snowflakes. The beautiful patterns of the flakes intrigued him. He studied them carefully and discovered an ice crystal at the heart of each flake. He tried to draw what he saw, but after 300 drawings he was still dissatisfied because the snow crystals melted before he could copy all their details on paper. When he was seventeen, he asked his father for a photomicrograph camera that would take pictures of magnified flakes.
It requires a great deal of skill and speed to take good pictures of snowflakes. The delicate crystals melt away at the slightest breath or the slightest contact with body heat. And even if they don’t melt, minor evaporation quickly changes their patterns.
Snowflake Bentley developed a technique that worked well. First, he caught some flakes by holding a black wooden tray out in the falling snow. Then he brought the tray into his workroom, which was kept at the same temperature as the outside air.
Holding his breath and wearing heavy mittens to keep the heat of his hands away from the snow crystals, he quickly examined his catch with a magnifying glass. If a flake looked promising, Bentley touched it gently at its centre with a wooden stick and moved it onto an ice-cold glass microscope slide, stroking it with a feather to flatten it and position it properly. If the crystal still looked good, Snowflake put the glass slide in front of the camera, turned it to face the best light, and took the picture.
Because snow crystals are transparent, they did not show up very well in the finished photograph. So, to make the picture clearer, Snowflake very carefully used a sharp knife to outline each flake on the negative, cutting away all the background film. This increased the beauty of the picture without changing the pattern of the crystals. The whole process required painstaking care, but Snowflake figured it didn’t take as much patience for him as it would for others because it gave him such pleasure.
Storm after storm, winter after winter, Bentley caught and photographed crystals. Because most snowflakes are either broken or clumped together, finding a single, undamaged flake was not as easy as it may seem. Some storms were better than others. A “good” storm was one with calm air in which the flakes did not stick together much or get blown about and broken. The winters also varied. In a good season Snowflake might find as many as 300 suitable crystals; in a poor one, maybe only 50 or less. During an especially good storm on 14 February 1928, Snowflake took a record of one hundred photographs!
In the thousands of snowflakes he examined, Snowflake Bentley never found any two exactly alike. Even though all of the crystals were based on a hexagonal, or six-sided, pattern, the details of their structure varied endlessly.
After Snowflake wrote an article for Harper’s magazine in 1898, his fame spread, and there was a sudden demand for his photographs. Tiffany’s, the great jewellery store in New York, bought 200 to use as patterns for jewellery designs. Artists, metal workers, silk manufacturers, and craft shops also began using his photos to help plan their designs. Most universities in the country bought collections of his slides. Meteorologists and scientists all over the world studied Snowflake’s pictures and read his articles.
Before he died, Snowflake put together a book containing 2500 of his pictures of snow crystals, frost feathers, and spider webs jewelled with dew. With this book, the man who loved snow left a lasting record of some of the beauty he saw in those tiny, perfect crystals with their intricate designs.
Answer the following questions.
Q1. Fill in the blanks:
a. Wilson Alwyn Bentley was called __________ because __________________________.
b. Wilson asked for a __________ because he wanted to take pictures of __________.
Q2. Give 3 characteristics of snowflakes.
1.———————————————————————–———————————–
2.———————————————————————–———————————–
3.———————————————————————————————————
Q3. How was Bentley’s collection of photographs used?
Ans._________________________________________________________________________________
Q4. What precautions did Bentley take during the process of photographing the snowflakes? How did he make the picture clearer?
Ans._________________________________________________________________________________
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Comprehension Passages
Comprehension passages are good for improving writing skills. A few paragraphs are given below to practice. Read each text carefully and attempt to solve it without making mistakes.