Jan 05, 2026 07:00:00

The first ever microscopic photograph of a snow crystal was taken in 1885.

Snow crystals are diverse and extremely beautiful, and have fascinated many people since ancient times. In Japan,

Toshitsugu Doi , the lord of the Koga domain in Shimousa Province, is famous for his ' Illustrated Snow Crystals ,' in which he observed snow crystals using a microscope and illustrated them. In America, however, in 1885, amateur researcher Wilson Bentley took the groundbreaking 'microscopic photograph of a snow crystal.'

Wilson A. Bentley: Pioneering Photographer of Snowflakes | Smithsonian Institution Archives
https://siarchives.si.edu/history/featured-topics/stories/wilson-bentley-pioneering-photographer-snowflakes

The First Photographs of Snowflakes: Discover the Groundbreaking Microphotography of Wilson 'Snowflake' Bentley (1885) | Open Culture
https://www.openculture.com/2017/12/the-first-photographs-of-snowflakes.html

Bentley was born in Vermont as the son of a farmer, and from an early age he loved observing the plants and insects around him. He also recorded the daily weather and was interested in raindrops. Although he completed his schooling at a public school, at the age of 15 he was given a microscope as a gift and after observing snowflakes, he decided to study snowflakes on his own.

After much trial and error, Bentley developed a device that connected a camera to a microscope and succeeded in taking the first photograph of a snowflake in 1885. Bentley waited patiently outside in the winter, used a feather to place falling snowflakes under his lens, and then took a picture of the snowflake after an exposure time of one and a half minutes.

The photo below is an actual snowflake photographed by Bentley.

Between 1885, when he first photographed a snowflake, and his death in 1933, Bentley photographed over 5,000 snowflakes in total.

In 1903, Bentley donated 500 of his photographs to the Smithsonian Institution to protect them from fire and accidental loss. As of the time of writing, some of these photographs can be viewed in

the Smithsonian's web archive .

In the fall of 1933, just before his death, he published a book called ' Snow Crystals ' with William Humphreys, a physicist at the U.S. Weather Bureau, which was a collection of 2,300 photographs of snow crystals.