appropriate he was born on february ninth in one thousand nine hundred sixty five i'm delighted to to see such a huge turnout this evening i'm sure he would be surprised also the weather of course is appropriate i want to thank before we begin our proceedings and if you thank yous and introductions here formalities to remember a player williams who we might say put wilson bentley still fake bentley back on the map for us blair began in the late fifty's early one nine hundred sixty s to restore revive or to remind us all of the importance of this remarkable man from jericho center from nashville then player continued with this energy all through that period lecturing around the state of vermont and of course culminating in the bentley museum here at the jericho historical societies building at the old red mill in jericho then we were also fortunate in jericho a few years you are familiar with his vermont studio of activities has each year prints a very selected edition from our jericho struck society collections and also from the buffalo museum of science the micro photograph images that bentley had made many years ago and they're recognizing of course collected both nationally and internationally thank you ray for all your efforts and louise too for supporting us i want to thank first this evening of course the jericho elementary school for allowing us to use their splendid facility this auditorium and gymnasium to lucy who's been extremely helpful and supportive of our efforts this evening he sort of is kind of the headmaster if you will of the elementary school and keeps it in splendid condition i also would like to mention that this evening we have special birthday cakes which courtesy will they help to us they harrington's folks down in shelburne and whom i've known for many years have produced these marvelous birthday cakes which we all enjoy here in little while mark green i don't think i need to introduce mark to many of us here this is mark brings trip to jericho so there's a strong relationship between the faire banks using him and the jericho historical society marcus here years ago to celebrate the one hundred twenty fifth anniversary of wilson's birthda and then he has spoken twice in recent years as many of you are familiar at the age old red mill in jericho at the jericho historical saudis distinguished winter lecture series which i'm sure many of you of course have attend these past few years markel introduced our panel which were very delighted and if i on a personal note was also to thank the bentley anniversary emerson from the jericho community center board and myself also on the board of the jericho historical society well we are about to begin our vent but one as i mentioned personal note this past fall and early winter when we were finalizing our speakers to beyond part of the panel on the symposium i rang up each of the speakers as you can see their names in the program and i was very pleased and honored by the response they all were extremely enthusiastic and delighted that we're having this she has blair taught for over thirty five years at the university of vermont and again i will repeat my sort of phrase mary jane is our jericho's poet laur last fall i commissioned her to write a poem about bentley and his life and his efforts and she will read that point to us graciously just before our winter musical interlude so i think it's time for us to have official greetings from catherine remains chair of the jericho select board catherine able to put on this suppose the town appreciates and has worked with the historical society to preserve the bentley legacy together they secure the place where the state historical marker injure the center and every small town in vermont we find very in fascinating interconnections for instance i live on bentley way and noted artist lives in the bentley home nobody can he it this is hard i think my voice carries well enough that i can probably get by without her parents grandparents there was three and sometimes four generations living in the household there and i would want to think perhaps and and in europe of historical society on behalf of the  family for putting together this wonderful celebration of wilson's life the first leaks or following the careers of the coming snow storm open the skylight and directly under it place the carefully prepared blackboard on whose ebony surface the most minute form of frozen beauty may be welcome from land those words were written by wilson bentley in one thousand know one as part of an article for her birth magazine willie apparently had a little passion to understand the origins of the family then can detail the history back to william bentley board about sixty and eighty in massachusetts and well much has been written about the bentley  that i am ever shall be i owed her the goldman family roots in america go back eight generations before willie two porter mr george coleman who arrived in massachusetts and sixteen forty families grandmother sarah irby also had the bruises from tragedy including her thirty three times great grandmother says in the north martin who was accused tried to hang for witchcraft in salem and sixteen maybe to fanning's mother susan she's a bit of a mystery though the history of bolton says she was born in jericho and that she and moses were married here in marrying someone of native american ancestry and age into any bible is not a particularly popular big thing to do so i suspect that maybe the reason that there wasn't any documentation of the marriage we do know though that they spent their lives  fanny and her brothers and sisters grew up there when he was a schoolteacher and in families parents will there were two just very interesting things with no first of all w library was mentioned in the inventory not something that was very common in a private family in the eight hundred seventy s and in particular know a bequest to fanny from that library of the new america and cyclopedia in gloria may's daughter's biography a monk willie and titled man of science man of god she mentioned early in the book about willy sitting searching for answers in the encyclopedia to his questions about nature which kind of led to fanny presenting him with the microscope that he first uses just copy the snowflakes the other interesting part of any parent's well was that when her mother died in one thousand eighty there was a bequest in the amount of one hundred dollars to fan by the time the oil settled in the states settled in about eight hundred eighty one isn't it interesting that that turns out to be the exact amount of money that fannie and i had we needed to come up we had to purchase the camera and microscope such an extravagant and spent about twenty five hundred dollars by today's standards for seventeen year old willie we secured his place in history with the story he has been documented many times his struggles to perfect is check me along with the personal struggles to gain acceptance within his community and he didn't do that within his own family his father and his own brother described is messing around with snowflakes wasting his time and the people in the community seem to think you have little cracked but he persevered and surely before his death in one thousand thirty one is life long dream came to fruition with the publication chance to see them and be thrilled by their beauty by the beauty we got in december twenty third one nine hundred thirty one is sixty six years old of pneumonia i have to wonder if he ever imagined that in twenty fifteen eighty three years after his dad people the world over would still be going to as it did in his work we still appreciate the delicate beauty found in each individual's no crystal perhaps he did it in one thousand twenty four he wrote nature's storehouse  and in particular his beautiful snow prez that is we're still endures is a testament to the dedication and passion of a humble vermont farmer who wanted nothing more than this year is discovery with the world away but through the beauty of this is evanescent like the beauties of the autumn as of the evening sky it paid but come again thank you very much us her poem about wilson badly which many of you will find as an insert in your program thank you mary jane after all the words that i was allowed to handle look at and sort of as if maybe a little of the d n a was still that i was able to touch and i am so appreciative of the special was so appreciate all the times i was able to give the old me a craft shop and just stand in that little museum grew into hate that  is falling onto the man whose bodies they had just born here a farmer's son never to be sent to war a  from the beginning he was his mother's prize do you want a dog crystalline forms of water making their way from the skies above to sparkle in of a shamrock the geometry of rock crystals gathered from a nearby hill and the elusive intricacy of it ever thus that snow crystal among the dark clouds of the store where widely speaking from handwritten letters sending out a graphic plates of snow crystals to the smithsonian from his fear of air and thank you now we're at our symposium and mark brain will be the moderator is you'll note from your program this evening and we're delighted again to have all of our guests with us they've come from long distances for vermont from granby from coventry and say john's birth and of course underhill center so we're delighted to have this panel to further elucidate us will speak just for a few moments a little bit about sort of our connection to you all of this and then we'll both exchange ideas but also welcome of course from you as well  briefly i just wanted to let you know that prior to coming to live in state college i really didn't know much about wilson bentley at all but while at the fairbanks museum i was looking for information about water great class to do for some of our visiting schoolkids so it was very interesting when i crept across a book called water bunkers by jean johnson but the interesting thing was that contained in here and this is by the way so titled wonders every child should know the style which i think is probably challenging to some of our high schools didn't suit it nevertheless this is the light bulb the light who book as one hundred and fifty six images from not only the snow crystals would you might expect but because this is a study on water there are marvelous photographs in here of spiderwebs deliberately laced with dewdrops we have the images in here of frost patterns on windows along with all of the snow crystals and just some delightful writing and so she came to jericho several times to work with could opt in turn around the corner and just find something you didn't notice but now this would be hard to imagine that they didn't notice this  here i have one of them and i kind of spirited this away from the museum for the evening i didn't think anybody would visit but we have here snowflake images from wilson there actually or abuse at the museum and they've included notes of from his journals about the different storms in the kind of crystals that they were producing and so  only did i have an interesting book written in the early nineteenth hundreds or hundred years ago but now i'm looking at images that he made it will soon bentley and these are some of his earlier just one of the i think maybe how many examples i can think of it you have to realize that even right here on our panel we have in vermont always have had an means density of creativity of the people doing amazing work and so we're certainly celebrating wilson bentley but we're very fortunate to have some of these people here assembled  audience participation for this first of all we all need to pretend that  different possibilities for those things to hook up and it becomes reasonable that there's never going to be too like it goes geometrically and it's a lot many more than seven billion different combinations that that still flake can turn into it so it really isn't a surprise that no to ever  produces less plate negatives stupendously effort and and is a very great quality i think i think it's about ok right now well i think first of all can you hear me ok i thinks no way or professor bradley would be very happy tonight because he also tried to hold a lecture in jericho during his time lecture that he held in jericho is he very very proud of this town and is his community for people showing up people thought he was a little cracked it we heard that before people he spent a little too much time lot about snowflake bentley in the last couple months or so before this looking at so crystals and he looked at stars and planets by night with a telescope so this was like when he of three hundred forty four raindrops this was something that hadn't been done before he used a pen full of flour and would run out in the rain during thunderstorms during light rain or in grizzle to try to get different sized raindrops and so this was done in eighteen eat fish he can eighty five and it took until nineteen forty or so for people to repeat  he also kept records on the aurora borealis the northern lights he recorded six hundred thirty four sightings in forty nine years so i'm just wondering when did this guy sleep to be so he was doing snow during the day he was doing you know the planets ok he was looking at the planets and  it we heard about his mother spending the one hundred dollars on the microscope he had other people that helped him along the way he had a photographer friend who was from bridgeport connecticut that gave him his first camera that he could start to experiment with experiment with photography and you see willie george professor george perkins from u b s helped him published his first scientific works in eighty ninety eight a study of snow crystals the smithsonian recognized the importance of preserving his work he sent a bunch of his photographs to smithsonian and they they they were smart enough to recognize that this is this is something we need to preserve and it was something bentley was worried about fire or flood or something destroying his work so that's why he sent a whole bunch of them down down to the smithsonian and since i work for the national weather service and a descendant previously named the weather bureau there were people in the weather bureau that  were advocates of his as well as the boston office of the weather bureau when he he would correspond to them with with letters so you know now you would talk on the phone or email or something like that but so once a week they would be trading letters back and forth and after he wrote his first paper he sent a letter to the boston weather bureau asking you know i could really do more if i had a copy of  daily you or the weather map because in those days there was no you know weather map there's no internet you know i could look like now you can look at a and e map of anything in the atmosphere on your phone but back then you had to get a map from austin so that boston office would send a maps every day so that he could correlate what he was observing with the snowflakes and his temperature gauge and all of those kind of things with the greater happenings in the you know in the world of meteorology like what's going on in new york and boston and chicago that how did that relate to what he was seeing i grandfather e h nash would help him change and number of the plates when he was taking the photographs and so nationality will kind of get the connection there and now we have one working in our office which is  the importance of what he was doing so he helped bentley write his book snow crystals so there's a there's a big sort of weather bureau national weather service connection there as well i thought the only thing i could talk about briefly and i know we'll have time for questions is the thing that fascinated me the most being a weather forecaster at heart was the is description of w where in the in the field of meteorology where on the weather map he was finding these crystals so he'd get these weather maps which now you can download at your p c or whatever at home they're all online so generally speaking the western quadrants of widespread storms are blizzards furnish the most beautiful and perfect forms at such times the wind is usually westerly or northerly that barometer standing at twenty nine point six to twenty nine point nine and slowly rising the percentage of perfect crystals is likely to be larger when this snow fall is not do that not too heavy and the crystals medium  size is medium to small rather than large the character of the snow falls off and undergoes quite an abrupt change as the storm progresses so i'm thinking ok so what does this mean to be in these days so why in jericho are is he getting these these crystals the perfect ones that it was that are and so the other thing he had to say is the best crystals do not occur as a rule during the most intense snow falls or during extremely low barabar rommany readings but during b t n or somewhat scanty snowfalls so what does that mean to a present coast of massachusetts or something like that so we're on the western side that's the cold side of the storm the warm side is to the east toward the ocean the humidity the amount of our vapor in the air is a little bit less on the west side little bit drier the temperatures are like i said are colder and also when the storm is to our east the winds come from the west and right up the slopes of the green we would be proud of us you can probably tell us how we were supposed to do it so if you can imagine the air riding up the slopes of the degree balance it creates a cloud a mountain type cloud on the western slopes and then you have which are coming in from the atlantic so one thing he noticed was that the best plates come when there are two layers clouds and we know that now as the cedar feeder process basically the moisture from the ocean comes in way high that is here say thirty thousand feet above the ground with ice crystals and they start falling and as they fall down they run into this upslope cloud with the winds from the west going up the slopes of the green mountains and so the combination of ice crystals from thirty thousand feet falling into the clouds it five or three thousand feet creates this perfect growth zone for snowflakes and the ideal temperature is about five degrees in the clouds so if the temperature in the cause is about five degrees and you have this cloud seeding from alo and the oyster feeding in from the up from from the mountains you get this perfect snowflake and that's why in jericho this kind of snowflake is pretty unique and you never found to we could stir it up again there was a scientist nancy who worked for and car which is the national center for atmospheric research and she was doing experiments over wisconsin  looking for cloud microphones it's looking at snowflakes and snow crystals in the clouds and found to be two nearly identical they have a photograph of these now i look at this photograph you can find it online didn't look quite the same to me but it was close it was close but bentley knew that if he could get up in the clouds he might find two that were alike but i think you know he was driven why did he do does someone do this for that long you know what was he looking for i think he was looking to see if he could find to a life  so what was his most important contribution just wrapping up before bentley there were just sketches of snowflakes so people would try to you know draw them basically what they saw you there under a microscope or something you know a magnifying glass so that didn't last long it would melt or evaporate you breathe on them and they'd go away so he he was able to preserve these you know forms to other people read about i think qantas soames up maybe bentley at least to me it did the first one you have to have a doozy as i'm in the country to study science and anyone who lives with that work and hopes that carried on well all he has it's own enthusiasm so he wasn't getting a lot of courage when from the community at large so he was driven by his own enthusiasm to do to study the snowflakes another one is a quote from one of his journals journals we still have this journal today it's called monthly weather review by the american meteorological society said in this inexhaustible storehouse of crystal treasures what it is in store for all future lovers of snowflakes and the beautiful and all the beautiful in nature you would never happen those words in a scientific journal you just wouldn't have the work beautiful because that's not objective it was just amazing he he was able to bridge the gap between science and theory with you know the jocks talk about and then finally but always from the very beginning it was this snowflakes that fascinated me the most the farm folks up in this north country dread the winter but i was  takes place on each of those points so way always the original molecule is six sided is the work you'll really take six of them to make the circle and then after that each of those six points that know one of the things that happens is that the snow bristols are made from water vapor so it's not liquid water droplets that are freezing into those forms that you see it's actually in visible water vapor that grows immediately basically vapor invisible to a solid so it so it does so snowflakes are not frozen raindrops frozen ringrose are those really heart little tiny things we call swee daughter for christmas got me a copy of one of these snow flake of our monitors and basically bentley he he also recorded weather to go every day the high temperature the low that kind of information on a daily basis when we're trying to forecast the snow it's something we look at and he i would love to have him here to see what you could do now i mean we would talk for all i bet but you know we look at the atmosphere in three dimensions so at the ground and you know all the way up to you know stratosphere and we search when we're doing the forecast we search for those perfect temperatures to produce how much snow we think we're going to get out of a given amount of liquid we call this no to liquid ratio or s l r so how much if we're expecting an in getting one inch of rain so that's going to be ten inches of snow that's sort of the standard ten to one but when temperatures are perfect and bentleys perfect forms are falling we can get as much as thirty inches of snow very good book about that but really his brother charles and that is that they got older they really took off the bulk of the bar work during the winter that not as much it needs to be done anyway his butt but the nephews and nieces were very fond of their uncle willie and they were more than happy to take on additional share and to help out there mark as always and physically do thank our distinguished panel this evening we also have as john touched upon some of that lee's artistic photographs here the one on my far right was in our jericho grammar school here at djerba corners for many years he lived across the road from the barrack family which is now called the range the forty's and now an artillery range and he was close to the the barracks there were three daughters one of whom was our teacher i had for four years and then your grammar school so it's now the property of the jericho for sure historical starting that on your left or two of my i have a number of things from the bent of a photograph but this evening i wanted to bring one on cloud studies which everyone touched upon which we was equally an innovator seminal thinker on the importance of studies with the weather and then a recent acquisition is a marvelous image of you can see his skills to get his technical skills of drawing on a limb to paint from billy photographed move some things in washington and then we'll go to the smithsonian yes there's a plethora of ugly i think united states produces probably obvious stamps in the world and so let's hope maybe bentley we will succeed and have a snowflake i'm one of our stamps one of these days thank you bob for bringing up the subject now we'll all enjoy