Wilson Bentley: Snowflake No. 920, c. 1890 – Porcelain Art Mug

Wilson Bentley was a farmer in Jericho, Vermont, in the snowbelt — about three metres of snow a year. His mother taught him at home. For his fifteenth birthday, in 1880, he was given a microscope. He spent the next years trying to draw what he saw in it, and failing.

Then he connected a bellows camera to the microscope. In 1885, aged nineteen, he made the first photograph of a snow crystal that anyone had ever made.

The apparatus stood outdoors, because indoors the specimens melted. He waited in the cold, caught the falling flakes on a board, moved them under the lens with a feather, and exposed for a minute and a half. He did this for forty-six winters and photographed more than five thousand crystals. From that collection came the sentence everyone now repeats without knowing whose it was: no two are alike.

This one is built in two rings. At the centre sits a small six-pointed star; around it, a ring of broad, curving plates, folded like ribbon. From there six long arms reach outward and break into fern-like fronds, each side branch at the same sixty-degree angle as the arm it grows from. The crystal was on the ground for a few seconds and then gone; the photograph is all that is left of it.

Bentley blacked out the background around each crystal so that it stands alone on a dark field. That is why the snowflake sits in a black disc. The plate was made around 1890 and is catalogued as No. 920. It survives in a public collection.

Fine porcelain, 10 oz — 104 mm high, 75 mm across the base. The picture sits on the front; handle and rim stay white. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

From the same series: Snowflake No. 815, c. 1890 · Snowflake No. 1152, c. 1890 · Frost, c. 1910 · Dew on a Spider Web, c. 1910

Wilson A. Bentley (1865–1931), Snowflake No. 920, c. 1890. Photomicrograph. Public domain (CC0).

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.