Wilson A. Bentley, the Snowflake Man

Bentley was a Vermont farmer and amateur meteorologist who became known to many during his lifetime as the Snowflake Man. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy D. Wilson. And Tracy.
I bet you were taught as a kid in science class,
probably pretty early on. That's all. Snowflakes are unique and

(00:25):
there are no two exactly the same. Yeah. I think
it was so early that science was not a separate class, right,
It was science together like kindergarten. And then we would
like fold the paper into little shapes and cut it
out and then unfolded and it would be our own
unique snowflake. There you go. Uh. Today, we're going to

(00:45):
talk about the origin of that by sharing the story
of Wilson Bentley, who was a farmer meteorologist who became
known to many during his lifetime as the snowflake Man.
I'm glad you picked this because I fund it interesting
and and I got to look at pictures of snowflakes.
So Bentley was born Wilson Alwyn Bentley on February nine,

(01:10):
eight sixty five, and Jericho, Vermont. Living in the farmhouse
where the Bentley's lived. There were Wilson and his brother Charles.
Their parents, Edwyn and Fanny Bentley, and their grandparents on
Edwin's side, Shelley and Abigail Bentley. Shelley and Abigail had
owned the property and then they had turned it over
to Edwyn when he was ready to start a family,

(01:31):
on the condition that he kept housing and caring for
his parents. So, while Wilson was still a boy, his
grandparents moved to another house down the road, and two
have Edwin's relatives, Mary and Melissa Blood, moved in. Wilson's
brother Charles, married Mary Blood when she was still just
a child of twelve herself. Yeah, we should also point

(01:53):
out that there is there are question marks about Mary
and Melissa and their relationship to the family because they're
often kind of casually referred to as cousins or distant relatives.
But it also seems like they may have been just
kind of like close friends of the family who had
fallen on hard times and needed a place to live,

(02:14):
and so they kind of got adopted into the family
unofficially um and got called cousins, but they were not.
They may not have been blood relatives at all. But
the area where the Bentley's lived was on the east
side of Jericho. It was close to Bolton Mountain and
it was serviced by a one room schoolhouse. But Wilson
Bentley did not go to school as a child, do

(02:34):
in some part to it just being difficult to actually
get to the school building for a lot of the
time during the year because of inclement weather where they lived,
but that does not mean he went without an education
thanks to his mother, who was an educator. According to
Bentley's own account, quote, I never went to school until
I was fourteen years old. My mother taught me at home.

(02:57):
She had been a school teacher before she married my father,
and she instilled in me her love of knowledge and
of the finer things of life. She had books, including
a set of encyclopedia. I read them all. He also
learned to play piano, clarinet, coronet, and violin from his mother,
and he played music his whole life and really loved it.

(03:18):
Bentley's mother is also the person who gave Wilson his
first microscope, essentially setting the stage for his life's work.
That microscope was old. It was one that had been
part of her science lessons when she was still teaching,
and she gave it to her son, who was ever
more curious about nature, and like a lot of kids
who get to play with microscopes, he just started putting

(03:40):
everything he could find under its lens, from flower pedals
to feathers to water. But even at that early age
fifteen by Bentley's recollection, what he really wanted to look
at was snowflakes. He would later write quote, when other
boys of my age were playing with pop guns and slingshots,
I was orbed in studying things under the microscope. Drops

(04:03):
of water, tiny fragments of stone, a feather dropped from
a bird's wing, a delicately veined petal of some flower.
But always from the beginning, it was the snowflakes that
fascinated me. Most the farm folks up in this north
country dread the winter, but I was supremely happy from
the day of the first snowfall, which usually came in November,

(04:26):
until the last one, which sometimes came as late as May.
As a team, he started taking the microscope to the
outermost room of the family farmhouse, which stayed very cold,
so he could look at ice crystals there. So we're
going to do a quick word here on the term
snowflake versus snow crystal or ice crystal. They all often
get used interchangeably, but the six sided shapes that we

(04:50):
all kind of vernacularly called snowflakes are really snow crystals,
and many snow crystals can make up a snowflake. They
clump together as they fall and then some times break
back apart. But snowflake can also still be used to
describe a single snow or ice crystal, and this is
something Bentley came to realize as he studied frozen precipitation

(05:12):
and snow crystals, of course, to be clear, are not
frozen rain, that is sleet. They are snow crystals formed
when water vapor becomes ice without passing through a liquid
water stage. Wilson observed all of this, but he didn't
just observe. He took detailed notes, and he drew snow crystals.
He knew that he was probably getting the details wrong, though,

(05:35):
and that frustrated him. Ice crystals being what they are,
they also melted before he could look at them again
and revise his sketches to make them more accurate. He
would try to hold his breath during his observations and
his sketching so that he wouldn't melt the things he
was trying to draw sometimes though he would exhale and

(05:56):
have to end that whole study accidentally. I can't imatione
one the tenacity that this requires him to the frustration
in those moments when you just let your breath go
because you can't hold your breath forever. Yeah, And then
you know, anytime I need to not breathe for some reason,
that's when I want to breathe so bad. For sure.

(06:17):
It becomes like a panic inducer for me. Um Wilson's
father was never especially enthused about his son's scientific pursuits.
He was a farmer, and he expected that Wilson would
follow suit. Even so, when Wilson learned about the possibility
of a camera that might be able to take photographs
through a microscope, he and his mother made the case

(06:39):
to Edwin Bentley that they needed one, and he ultimately
acquiesced to that request. And this was to be clear
a big investment. According to Wilson Bentley's later in life
writing quote, when I was seventeen years old, my mother
persuaded my father to buy for me the camera and microscope,
which I have developed into the apparatus I am still using.

(07:01):
It cost even then one hundred dollars. You can imagine
how my father hated to spend all that money on
what seemed to him a boy's ridiculous whim. Something to
note here is that while the elder Bentley okayed the
acquisition of this equipment, Wilson was in no way absolved

(07:22):
of any of his duties on the farm. He could
pursue his snowflake studies, but he could not shark any
other parts of his work, and this held true for
the whole time he was doing this research and doing
experiments with photography. But Wilson Mentley was still a teenager
at this point. He had never taken a photograph in

(07:42):
his life when he had this new camera, and his
work with the microscope was largely self directed, with some
pointers from his mother. If you have ever gotten really,
really excited about a new technology or a hobby and
bought a bunch of expensive equipment, only to realize you
have no idea you what to do with it, you
are kind of where Wilson Bentley was in the early

(08:04):
eighteen eighties. I'm just gonna say I don't know what
that's like at all. I was just thinking about how
I have a little point and shoot camera that has
all kinds of settings that I like. I thought I
was going to learn how to use them all, and
I've learned none of them. I just used the automatic one,

(08:28):
which at this point is effectively the same as my phone.
See this made me think of when I got my
embroidery machine and then was like, I need a bunch
of software to do custom designs. And then I was like, okay,
now what Slowly you figure it out. Although he may
have been initially overwhelmed and probably disheartened by a lot

(08:51):
of disappointments early on, he kept at it. He worked
through trial and error to figure out how the camera
worked and how he could actually take photos of microscopic things.
Because he approached it this way, though, he started to
understand the camera and his microscope and the behavior of
the ice crystals with incredible depth of expertise. He figured

(09:14):
out a way that he could collect the snow crystals
on a black board outside and then move inside carefully
with the ones he had collected, and then he used
a chicken feather, something that was very abundant on the farm,
to very carefully move the snow crystal that he wanted
to look at onto a plate and under the microscope.

(09:36):
One of the problems was simply a matter of size,
not of the snowflakes, but of the camera. The camera
that Bentley had purchased was a Bellows camera. That's one
of the ones that has like an accordion between the
length part and the back part if you're having trouble
visualizing it. He had to position the microscope at one

(09:58):
end and then step around to the other side of
it to see through the viewfinder. But if he was
looking through the camera and needed to focus the microscope,
he could not do both of that at the same time.
The length of the Bellows was longer than the distance
of his arm that he could reach. So to solve
that problem, Bentley came up with a way to attach

(10:18):
the fine focused mechanism of the microscope to a wheel
and pulley that he could manipulate from the other end
of the camera while still seeing the image. It's pretty ingenious.
His first successful photo micrograph was made on January five
during a snowstorm. Bentley, who was just shy of his
twentieth birthday, was elated, and he later wrote of that

(10:41):
moment quote the day that I developed the first negative
made by this method and found it good. I felt
almost like falling on my knees beside that apparatus and
worshiping in it was the greatest moment of my life.
The first picture of a snowflake had been made. It
had taken Bentley four years to figure out exactly how

(11:01):
to do it, so most people would probably want to
scream about that kind of achievement from the rooftops. But
Bentley was not like most people we'll talk about when
he decided to share his photo micrograph work after a
quick word from a sponsor. So, as we mentioned before

(11:26):
the break, Wilson Bentley had taken the first photograph of
a snowflake, but he did not immediately share his work,
not even close. It was another thirteen years before anyone
even heard about it. But during those thirteen years he
was incredibly busy. He worked during that time to capture
more images, more than four hundred, but he also started

(11:49):
composing a data record of not just the ice crystals
he had observed, but also meteorological data like storm severity
and timing, trying to see if there was a pattern
that would link the characteristics of the ice crystals he
observed with the nature of the storm that had delivered them,
and he was really doing this, it seemed just out
of sheer curiosity and enthusiasm for it. He didn't think

(12:12):
he was doing anything that was especially groundbreaking, and kind
of presumed that anything he found had already been studied
by scientists and scholars, and he certainly wasn't making any
money at it. He just loved it. This level of
devotion to something with no bigger plans for the pursuit
may seem odd. It certainly did to people who knew Wilson.

(12:36):
He was generally considered odd or eccentric by pretty much everyone.
One story told by a fellow villager was that as
a prank, a bunch of boys switched the wheels on
Bentley's buggy so that the front wheels were the big
ones and the back ones were small, instead of the
normal way, which was the other way around. They were
even more amazed when Bentley showed no reaction to this

(12:59):
and just drove a buggy home and never mentioned it. Uh.
It's not clear whether he didn't notice or just ignored it. Yeah,
just an illustration of how he was a little bit different.
But though people found him strange, he was also generally
well liked because he was a very kind, quiet young man, easygoing, witty,

(13:21):
and friendly, despite the fact that he was also a
bit of an introvert. He loved to play piano for
the kids in the community, and he played cornet in
a brass band. And because Jericho was a very small community,
everyone knew about his fascination with precipitation in Bentley's collection
of snow crystal photographs, which totaled more than four hundred,

(13:43):
was purchased by the Harvard Mineralogical Museum, and that same
year a professor at the University of Vermont named George
Perkins heard about Wilson Bentley in his obsession with ice crystals.
He had seen the photographs and was amazed. But Bentley
had never written about his work, at least never successfully.

(14:03):
He had made one attempt, but that had fallen flat.
Writing skills were just not the best, and he never
tried again. But George Perkins took Wilson's notes and turned
them into an article that was published in Appleton's Popular
Science monthly, and the two men shared a byline on it.
And that article ends with a paragraph that, well, it

(14:23):
may have been helped along by Perkins is very much
in the style of writing that Bentley's later papers would
show really for the rest of his life. It is
a very sweet and wonder laden commentary on snow crystals,
which reads quote, there is no surer road to fairyland
than that which leads to the observation of snow forms.

(14:44):
To such a student, the winter storm is no longer
a gloomy phenomenon to be dreaded. Even a blizzard becomes
a source of keenest, enjoyment and satisfaction as it brings
to him from the dark, surging ocean of clouds forms
that thrill his e your soul with pleasure. This was
the first of many articles, papers, and books that he

(15:06):
went on to write. Once he realized he could share
what he was doing, it was like he couldn't stop.
And his photographs had been made into an exhibition at Harvard.
Suddenly he had the attention of a lot of people.
He wrote regularly for the monthly Weather Review and other publications,
always intertwining his scientific observations with this poetic style of writing.

(15:29):
The first years of the twentieth century were very productive
for Bentley. In nineteen o one, he published an article
titled twenty Years Study of Snow Crystals that established a
lot of ideas about snow and ice that were way
ahead of their time. One of the most significant aspects
of its contents was Bentley's observation that in all of
the snow crystals he had observed, he had never seen

(15:52):
to that were alike. He also stated that in his observations,
the western and northwestern areas of storms produced the most
perfect crystals. He also explained how he had come to
the conclusion that conditions aloft were more important and influential
to the formation of snow crystals than conditions closer to
the Earth. That same year, Bentley had an exhibition of

(16:15):
his photographs at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
Then just a month later, his work was featured in
the quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society in England.
So you may be wondering what does a person this
obsessed with weather created ice crystals do when it is
too warm for those to form. He studies precipitation in

(16:36):
its liquid form. It turns out, at least that's what
Bentley did, just as he had wondered what caused ice
crystals to form in snow. He started investigating how rain
actually formed in He started by trying to measure rain
drops that He did this in a really inventive way.
There were already some scientists measuring the splashes that raindrops

(16:58):
left when they hit a piece of paper or some
other surface, but Bentley started using flower. He spread the
flower evenly across a tray and then passed that tray
through the rain. As a rain drop hit this inch
deep flower layer, it would form a tiny ball of
simple dough. When those little drops of dough dried, he

(17:19):
measured them to figure out the size the raindrop had been.
He performed control experiments to compare by dropping measured amounts
of water onto the flower himself, so that he had
an existing data set to use. This is so ingenious.
I like to go, oh, I can create a set

(17:40):
and then I'll have that as my comparative measure. That
just seems brilliant to me. Um And He measured hundreds
of rain drops over the next seven years, culminating in
an article in the Monthly Weather Review. The largest raindrops
that he measured were roughly six millimeters. It's very roughly
a quarter inch in diameter and He noted that, just
as was the case with snowflakes and snow crystals, different

(18:03):
types of storms created different types of rain. In particular,
he observed that when lightning was overhead, there was a
greater frequency of large rain drops. Even though he was
doing a lot of really groundbreaking work, in terms of
the reception from the scientific community, he got a lot
of silence, and he probably would have liked any kind
of feedback, even if it was critical. We don't know

(18:24):
for sure why so few scientists even to acknowledge what
he was doing. I mean, we've talked before about like
the scientific establishment being really reluctant to people they perceived
as amateurs. But at this point in history, most people
were amateurs. So uh, people knew what he was doing,

(18:44):
and it seemed kind of strange that there wasn't a
lot of engagement from that quarter. It could have been
a matter of his outsider status, Like I just said,
nobody knew who this farmer from Vermont was, or how
or why he had started studying meteorology, you with no
formal schooling. Biographer Duncan Blanchard theorized that it could also

(19:05):
have been the way that Bentley wrote about his work
was not always really scientific in its tone. It really
retained the wonder and the delight that Bentley felt for
the natural world, and that may have led to it
not being taken very seriously. But because of that, he
was really forging ahead in an understanding of his subjects
with no collaborators. He was breaking this new ground by himself,

(19:29):
even though nobody else is really watching. And here are
a couple more examples to illustrate what we're talking about
when we say that Bentley wrote about his work in
ways that were decidedly unlike the scientific community. In an
article that he wrote for Technical World in nineteen, it
opens with the lines quote, what magic is there in
the rule of six that compels the snowflake to conform

(19:52):
so rigidly to its laws? Here is a gem bestrewn
realm of nature, possessing the charm of mystery of the unknown,
sure richly to reward the investigator. It's very sweet, not
super scientific sounding. Uh. And he ended that same article,
which was titled snow Beauties, by writing quote, Indeed, it

(20:14):
seems likely that these wonderful bits of pure beauty from
the skies will soon come into their own and receive
the full appreciation and study to which their exquisite loveliness
and great scientific interest entitled them. Even A more technical
article that Bentley penned in two to explain his photographic
process gets a bit flowery quote. Every snowflake has an

(20:38):
infinite beauty, which is enhanced by knowledge that the investigator will,
in all probability never find another exactly like it. Consequently,
photographing these transient forms of nature gives to the worker
something of the spirit of a discoverer. Besides combining her
greatest skill and artistry in the production of snowflakes, nature

(20:59):
generously fashions the most beautiful specimens on a very thin plane,
so that they are specially adapted for photo micrographical study.
In just a minute, we are going to delve into
something we haven't really touched how much yet, and that
is Wilson Bentley's personal life. But first we will pause
for a sponsor break. As Wilson Bentley was doing all

(21:28):
of this research and writing, he was still also working
the family farm. His father died in seven and at
that point his mother was largely immobile and needed a
great deal of care, and that care just became part
of Wilson's responsibilities. He cooked for her and took care
of her until her death in nineteen o six. His
brother Charles, after a brief foray into growing oranges in

(21:51):
Florida that ended in disaster with a freeze, had also
returned to Vermont and helped run the family farm after
that point, and the farmhouse had basically been split into
two years earlier, when an addition had been made after
Charles and Mary got married and after their parents were gone.
Wilson lived on one side and his brother, his sister
in law, and their eight children lived on the other.

(22:14):
While an entire space to one person seems like it
would be the less chaotic household, Bentley was apparently kind
of a mess, so he tended to have piles of
stuff everywhere, and while it looked baffling to his family,
he generally has said to have known how to find
things when he wanted them. As he matured, Bentley was

(22:34):
a little disappointed that the people he lived alongside really
never came around thinking that his work was anything more
than a silly fixation. It appears from his writing that
he had always really hoped that the people of Jericho,
Vermont would see and understand that his efforts had real
merit quote years ago. I thought they might feel different

(22:56):
if they understood what I was doing. I thought they
might be glad to understand. So I announced that I
would give a talk in the village and show lantern
slides of my pictures. They're beautiful, you know, marvelously beautiful
on the screen. And when the night came for my lecture,
just six people were there to hear me. It was
free bind you, and it was a fine, pleasant evening too,

(23:19):
but they weren't interested. Bentley stopped writing for scientific publications
in nineteen fifteen, after a very lengthy article for monthly
Weather Review had been rejected. He continued to take snow
crystal photos, though, including photographing three thirty eight snow crystals
over the course of nineteen snowstorms in the year nineteen nineteen.

(23:41):
But then in the fall of nineteen twenty, Bentley had
an explosion of press coverage and got the nickname the
Snowflake Man. This started with an article in the New
York Tribune that covered his lifelong career and examining and
documenting snow crystals. Another right up, this one in the
Boston Herald fall shortly after that, then another and Leslie's Weekly,

(24:03):
and then one in the Boston Globe. The world seemed
to be remembering Bentley after having forgotten him for a
few years, and this time he was clearly in the spotlight.
He sort of turned into an overnight sensation, but this
was all based on work that he'd been doing for
thirty five years at this point. Yeah, it reminds me
of that thing where like anybody, like a writer, will

(24:24):
suddenly have a hit book and people be like, what's
it like to be an overnight sensation, and they're like,
I don't know, but it's the same thing he was.
To him, it was always just work, work, work. He
also started to become kind of more of a science
communicator for the masses. He started writing for non scientists
and people with curious minds who just wanted to understand
the natural world. He was essentially writing for people just

(24:47):
like himself, and his work continued to grow in popularity
as a consequence, and soon he had articles in the
New York Times, National Geographic, and Popular Mechanics. Eventually this
work turned into a lecture tour. All the folks of Jericho,
Vermont may not have wanted to see Bentley's slides and
hear him talk about snowflakes and rain drops. It turned

(25:09):
out that a lot of other people did. He started
selling his slides to schools, although he was not doing
this for the money by any means. He never really
made a lot of money off of it. And even
though he was not as focused on scientific writings any longer,
Bentley was still following his curiosity where it led him.
In the natural world. He continued to track weather patterns,

(25:31):
but he also developed a lot of other interests. He
started collecting rocks for geological analysis, and he took photos
of other things that were not snow crystals, including people
and flora. And he also started doing something that sounds
really odd and in today's world would undoubtedly be branded
as creepy. He started cataloging smiles, particularly girls smiles. So

(25:54):
he would talk to girls that he met on the
street if he thought they had what he called a
quote charming smile. And he seemed fascinated by the same
thing in smiles that he was fascinated about snowflakes. No
two are alike. So this is where we get to
the squirrely part. That smile thing is odd, but There
were also people who thought his affinity for the company

(26:17):
of kids rather than adults was also odd. We mentioned
that he loved to play music for kids, but he
also did things like build them tree forts and take
them fishing. Sometimes he would take some of them to
Burlington to go to the movies, particularly girls. This definitely
got some tongues wagging about whether this was appropriate or not.

(26:37):
Biographer duncan Ce Blanchard interviewed some of the kids many
years later as adults, and they defended Bentley as being
excited to teach kids and to spend time with them
because they had the same enthusiasm for things like nature
and discovery that he did. He had enjoyed the nieces
and nephews that lived on his brother's side of the farmhouse,

(26:58):
and as they grew up, he seemed to take on
a sort of uncle role to other kids in Jericho. Yeah,
that's one of those things that comes up and nobody
really has any Like there was gossip, and there were
people that were like, no, that's baseless, but we really
have no idea if there was anything weird. But throughout
the years he gained more recognition and he was always

(27:18):
really ceaselessly generous with anyone who wanted copies of his slides.
In one exchange, in a woman named Charlotte Bean sent
him three dollars in a letter asking for photos, and
he sent sixty of them along with a letter back
in which he told her, quote, it was generous of
you to tell me how much you enjoy the snow, etcetera.
Photos for it gives me pleasure to learn so many

(27:40):
are enjoying them. As the photos gained a wider audience
and wider recognition for their beauty, he also got to
see that they directly inspired other creators and his own words,
he saw them used quote as models for designs in
public schools and in schools of art. They are used
for designnes, for interior decorators, for wallpaper, for silk doylies, china,

(28:04):
any number of things. Even though he had not initially
been recognized for his work, at least from the science
side of things, that started to shift as he traveled
and shared his thoughts on meteorology and gained a greater following.
Then came a not insignificant gesture in recognition of those
years of work, and that happened in nineteen twenty four.

(28:25):
That year, he received a grant from the American Meteorological Society,
the first research grant that organization ever issued. In nineteen thirty,
an effort began to preserve Bentley's work with snowflakes in
a book. A physicist named Dr William J. Humphreys, who
worked for the U. S. Weather Bureau, initiated the project
after having received requests for such a book over the

(28:48):
years from people who had become familiar with the work
of the snowflake Man, Humphreys started a fund raising endeavor
to get the financial needs for the publication squared away,
and once the money was secured, which it was pretty quickly,
there was one UH donor who pretty much covered the
majority of it. It was then on Bentley to actually
put the book together, and he went through his years

(29:10):
of snow and ice crystal research and all of his
many slides of snow crystals, dew, and frost, and he
wrote about the ways he had classified such things and
what sorts of weather phenomena could be linked to various kinds.
He finished this project in mid nineteen thirty one. In
the book, titled Simply Snow Crystals, was published in November
of that year, W. J. Humphries wrote the preface. After

(29:34):
receiving his author copies, Bentley wrote to Humphries quote, I
received three copies of our book Snow Crystals the day
after Thanksgiving, and I am delighted with it. The text
seems to me perfect and the half tones are superb.
The second week of December one, just a couple of
weeks after holding his book in his hand for the
first time, Wilson Bentley was too sick to get out

(29:57):
of bed. He waved off the concern of his family,
saying that he would be fine, but his condition quickly
got worse. Another week passed, but then Bentley's nephew called
a doctor. At that point it was too late. He
had pneumonia. Wilson Bentley died two days before Christmas nineteen
thirty one, at the age of sixty six. According to

(30:18):
coverage of his funeral in the St. Albans, Vermont Daily Messenger, quote,
Mount Mansfield and its foothills, where Mr Bentley had taken
literally thousands of photographs of snowflakes, were blanketed in snow.
The sun shone brightly from a perfectly clear sky. It
was estimated that seventy five people attended Bentley's funeral service.
One right up in the local press read quote, Wilson

(30:41):
Bentley was a greater man than many, a millionaire who
lives in luxury of which the snowflake man never dreamed.
Bentley took more than five thousands snowflake photos in his life,
and they're beautiful. He used the same Bellows camera from
the eighteen eighties right up until the end of his life.
Five hundred of those photos or in the Smithsonian collection.

(31:02):
Bentley donated them to ensure their safety. Most of his
slides are cared for by the Jericho Historical Society. There
are a few sets that are in other museum collections
as well. And in twenty six of Bentley's images went
up for sale at the American Antique Show. Ten of
them were snowflake photographs. Remember he didn't only take photos

(31:23):
of snowflakes, and those snowflake photos were priced at nearly
five thousand dollars each. This would have undoubtedly been quite
a surprise to Bentley, who once noted in his life
that he had made about four thousand dollars in total
for all of his snowflake work, and that he had
spent about fifteen thousand doing it. You can also still

(31:45):
buy Bentley's book Snow Crystals. You can and it's beautiful.
Do you have some listener mail to take us out?
I did. This is from our listener Margaret, who writes
High Holly and Tracy. I just finished your Saturday classic
about Walter Potter, and I loved the Field Museum shout out.
I live in the suburbs of Chicago, and it's one
of my favorite places to visit. I have always thought

(32:06):
the placement of the Tsavo lions was interesting. They're basically
under a staircase, fully visible, but sort of out of
the way, like even the other exhibits are afraid of them.
I went to College Downtown and one of the extra
credit assignments I got in an anthropology class involved going
to the field and taking pictures with a bunch of
specific artifacts. However, the ta who selected the artifacts was

(32:27):
going off an old visit or something, because, despite the
multitude of animals, he picked a bird that was nowhere
to be found. One of the artifacts we did find
is the bust of an Egyptian queen who looks exactly
like Michael Jackson. Uh and Margaret attached to picture so
we could see that's accurate. I haven't been there since
the pandemic, she writes, but I'm eager to go back
to see the space they've made for Sue, famous for

(32:50):
being the most complete t Rex skeleton ever found, she
graced the main hall for years, but was recently replaced
by a replica of a much larger dinosaur. Sue moved
upstairs or the other dinosaurs, but was still given her
own special area. I hope you have a nice holiday season.
Thank you for helping keep me saying. I work retail,
but in a mostly office capacity, so I turn on

(33:10):
podcast when i'm going to be in here a while,
and yours is the first one I check for new episodes. Margaret,
thank you so much for this. I always love hearing
about people's love for the field because it's one of
my favorite museums. I was a little bummed. I went
to Chicago in that magical sort of I feel like
there was a part of the calendar in parentheses where
it seemed like things were getting much better for a minute.

(33:32):
And I went there to see my best friend and
we did not make it to the field that trip,
and I was like, Oh, I'll come back in a
couple of months and I can not been back so um,
but I cannot wait to go back because I desperately
love that museum. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at iHeart radio
dot com. You can also find us on social media
as Missed in History, and if you would like to subscribe,

(33:53):
you can do that on the iHeart Radio app or
wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. M