Page 1 - Good News April 2012 paper

ilson (Willie) Bentley (1865 - 1931)
everything from flowers to snow - and snow
was born on a farm in Jericho, especially fascinated him.
WVermont. Jericho was an ideal place One of his inspirations to study snow was the Bible
to study snow because it was in the heart of verses in Job 38 about the “treasures of the snow.”
the snowbelt, producing an average annual When asked why he took an interest in snow, he
snowfall of over 120 inches. Willie was home- answered that snowflakes were miracles of beauty;
schooled until age 14. Then he attended and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be
public school for several more years. By age seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a
14, he wanted to explore the world of science masterpiece of design; and no one design was ever
firsthand. He went from exploring the repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was
vastness of the universe, seen in the heavens forever lost. So much beauty was gone, without
through a telescope, to the tiny, nearby world leaving any record behind. He became obsessed
seen under the lens of a microscope. The Continued on p. 8
Continued on p. 8
very first money earned in his early teens was
invested in a telescope. At night he would
look at the stars and the planets, and by day
he observed the sunspots on the face of the
sun. But one year later an old microscope
was to change his life forever. A true
experimentalist, he meticulously collected
large amounts of data on the weather, and
completed a variety of pioneering
experiments to understand raindrops, frost,
moisture, etc. While he was still a boy, his
mother, a school teacher, gave him a
microscope that he used to observe