Wait, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. We'll play a podcast that we made back in 2012. This is a show that I believe has disappeared from the RSS feed. And I thought we'd bring it back because it captures a feeling that I think maybe we all need a little bit more of these days.
Here's how we started the show. Okay, hello, hello. Hello. Hello.
How are you? We are super, super excited to talk with you. Oh, well, same with me. I'm sorry about the delay.
Oh, that's fine. No, it's a life is crazy. Life is crazy. Yeah, no.
But you were so enthusiastic. So I need to talk to this guys. They really mean it. This is Alex.
Alexander Gomma. Gomma. Are you Norwegian all the way back? Yeah.
Typical Norwegian. You know, if typical includes things like biking, in Sahara and climbing Everest and things like that. He's kind of a professional adventurer. And we got him to the studio because he made a video last year on one of his trips.
Can I tell you this video? It's maybe the most amazing internet video I've ever seen. I think so too. So let me just set the scene for you.
Okay. What you see in the video is this guy, Alex, kind of moving along. He's on skis. This snowy snowscape.
He's filming himself. He's got the camera on his right hand. Where is he, exactly? In Artico.
He's on a three month trek to the south pole and back by himself. And what he's been doing is every couple of days on his trip, you know, every 200 kilometers or so, he would bury stuff in the snow. Some fuel and sometimes a little bit of gear that I didn't use. Was that just a light in your load?
Yeah. Yeah, because every ounce of uneven weight has to go. So in this video, it's day 86. Almost three months since I left.
That's three months of walking 10 hours a day. And I lost almost 25 kilos. 55 pounds. He's exhausted.
He's come up on his last cache. So on the last cache where this video is captured. What you see is Alex, Neil in the snow. Start a dig.
I'm telling them I'm quite hungry. Whatever's in this last cache in the snow, it's been three months since he buried it. So I didn't really recall what was there. Man, I'll kill over hope.
He hopes it's some good. So he digs up this bag of stuff, starts rifling through it. It's a mess. It's a mess.
It's pretty much all crushed. I'm going to see my ass. I'm going to see my ass. I'll see my ass.
I'll see my ass. I'll see my ass. But then... Yeah!
What are you doing? He holds up. Dad, I'm going to pull the pussy. She's doing this.
A double pack of cheese doodles. Yeah! Then he throws it up in the air. Yeah!
And then this is my favorite part. He just freezes. And he's staring off into the distance. I was like, did that happen?
That's me. Killer? Is it real? So he starts to dig some more.
And then... It's a huge chocolate bar. It's milk chocolate. And then it's just like...
He's going cementos. I find more and more and more. Have you ever been that happy in your life? Well, I've been thinking about that.
When did you shout last time you were so happy? I think that's why we've been watching this video over and over again. Because none of us can remember. It's like what stands between you and that feeling.
Is it really interesting question? Yeah, it's three months with hunger. Actually, I think the reason I like this video so much is not just because he's happy. It's that he's somehow stumbled into this moment of perfection.
It's just like a perfect situation. By being so tired and so hungry and finding such a stash of candy that he had forgotten that he left. He created a moment of just absolute complete bliss. In this hour on Radio Lab we're going to be searching for moments like Alex had up in Antarctica.
We're going to be searching for bliss. Bliss of all different sorts. Perfect. Moments.
The kind of bliss that slips right through your fingers. And the kind of bliss that just might last. And last. Just before we go to the first story in this episode, I wanted to mention that this whole hour was produced by a guy named Tim Howard, who was a longtime producer at Radio Lab and then went on to become the editor of an amazing podcast called Reply All.
And I asked him, what a curse to you as you listen to it again. There's this moment that jumps out at me where you hear this woman, Shirley McNaughton, who's like a key character in the story. She just radiates so much generosity and love. And I just find it so freaking moving.
Like she goes through a lot in this story. Like she really is just like challenged in incredible and kind of impossible ways that I think would turn a lot of people really bitter. And I wonder how I would react with everything that she went through. If I went through it myself.
And it's really nice to actually think about that. Like how I would deal with such an incredibly challenging situation. And could I myself keep such like love and admiration for this guy, Charon? And I just find it so inspiring.
That she somehow stayed open-hearted. Yeah. As I listened back, I was just like, man, I just feel so lucky that I got a chance to talk to her. I don't know.
That's kind of pledge-driving. But honestly, that was like a feeling that I had. Okay, here is that original story. It begins with a box of tapes.
Alright, so check it out. This is my office and you've got a rectangular package here. What is it? It is a very old looking box.
It doesn't look like much. It's just about like 15 sets. Game number six, singing and playing to friends in America. Okay, so this is Charles.
Charles Kaisiele Bliss. An amazing character. And that's Richard. Richard Ewe, he's a fellow who gave me the cassette.
He was a friend of Charles. Yeah. So these were just like sitting in his attic or something? Garage.
He looked like, I suppose, a little gnome, a little leprechaun almost. To life, to life, to life, to life. He was short, bald, and laughter the whole time. Even a blossom.
He was a lovable character. Simple as that. This is my favourite one. I'm older, I need to explain why we're talking about this guy.
Sure. Because these tapes tell an amazing story about a guy who really embodied his name. And he tried to save the world, but ultimately just tried too hard. It turned him out about to do my last game in 1988.
We can start a story here. This is from a lecture that he gave decades later. So the story goes, it's 1908. And he's a little kid living in what's now the Ukraine.
Okay. And his name is Carl Bliss. Not Charles Bliss. Carl Bliss.
Carl Bliss. V-L-I-T-Z. That's his original name. And little Carl.
Was fascinated by tales of discovering adventure. My name is Erica O'Grantt. Erica wrote about Charles Bliss in his great book called, In the Land of Invented Languages. Getting back to the story, one day she says when Carl was 11.
A lecture came through town about some. Oh, stand, pull up expedition. Pull up expedition. To explorers.
Talking about their trek across the North Pole. And he was so inspired by what he saw and heard at that lecture that even decades later he couldn't talk about it. And my father took me to this, excuse me. Without getting choked up.
My father took me to this lecture. And there I saw men who left them warm homes to secure their sisters. And went out into the Arctic, into the icy snow in almost certain tests. For what?
For what? For in search of knowledge? For an idea? As he tells it on those tapes, that was the beginning of his big idea that was going to change the world.
Fast forward a few years. Back into Vienna after the first world war. He did end up going to the Technical University of Vienna. I was suddenly discovered to be the best man to be a lead player in Austria.
At one time I played with a full opera orchestra under the action of the composer, Frank Scheck. Ah, those were the days. And then everything changed. In 1938.
German troops were on the Austrian border. The Nazis came to town. The Nazis came to town. The Nazis came to town.
He was sent to Dachau and then Buchenwald. You know, the concentration camps. One feeling, one visual desire to end my life. All around him people were being worked to death or outright exterminated.
But his wife Claire was a German Catholic with connections. And clear my good vibes to my mentally and my guitar into the concentration camp. I became so famous among the Nazis, and for instance our block figure would come into our vanak and say, And you could say that it was here in Buchenwald that Karl started to develop his ideas about language. By the ways that you can manipulate words.
For instance, there was this one song that all the prisoners sang. The Bauhu by Cleed, one of the saddest songs I can ever meet. Had the saddest lyrics in the world. At a certain point Karl started to play around with the song.
You know, he'd swap out some of the saddlers for some jokes, sing it for his fellow prisoners. And they laughed and laughed and laughed and forgot for a few minutes that they are the darkest. And there was terrible holes on earth. And on the flip side, every evening the guards would march all the prisoners outside.
Fours them the sander in the cold in front of these loudspeakers. Make them listen to these speeches. Speeches of Hitler and Gerbil's screaming Nazi slogans. Like, don't you love me!
Which means Germany above all. Enough time! Men are the stretch of the race, that's the word! Which means you make!
Which don't you make! But after about a year. His wife somehow wrangled a British v stuff for him and he... Gets out.
Hank heavens those dreadful times are gone. And now I can play here for you and improvisation as it comes into my mind. In 1939 he went to Britain. And got a job as a miniature of a factory.
But he arrived in England just as... The Blitz begins. The Germans start to bomb every major city in England. The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of the air raid's firing.
And every time he'd introduce himself to somebody new, they'd shut her. That can't be her name. Because I'm like Blitzkrieg? You can't go around here and get it.
It's a name like Blitz. So I changed from the war like Blitz to the peaceful base. That was how he became Charles Bliss. Bliss has all the right associations, so he went forward with the feeling of that he was now Bliss and would bring happiness to the world.
And a year later he and his wife end up in China in Shanghai where there was a big population of exiled Jews. Shanghai was the only place that would take that at that time. And there in China, and there in China, I got the opportunity of my lifetime. And now we come to his big idea.
I realized, but I didn't know, that the Chinese have a different way of writing. He became enraptured by the Chinese writing that he saw. The Chinese use symbols. And each symbol is a word.
And he writes about having this epiphany when he saw the Chinese symbol for man. He saw that the Chinese written form of man sort of looks like a man. It looks like a sick figure man. And it means man.
He doesn't even know what the Chinese word for man is. He doesn't know how to say man, but that doesn't matter. He is skipping a word and going directly into the meaning. So here was a way of getting beyond language.
You could think the word in any language if you see it in the symbol. And that was a revelation. Why? Well, I mean think back to the concentration camps when they were outside in front of those loudspeakers listening to Hitler's saying stuff like, Gochlan, Uber, all this, you know, Germany above all.
That phrase, Charles knew that it actually predated the Nazis. That was quite a hundred years earlier in the war. And originally it was meant as a rallying cry to bring together all these separate principalities. The Kingdom of Bavaria, the Kingdom of Saxonia, the Kingdom of Saxonia.
That spoke German, but these were not one country. So when they said to H. Landugrallis, it meant unification. Unified Germany.
The nation above the states. Oh, so it wasn't an Australian aggressive thing. No. But Hitler turned this around.
Hitler changed the meaning. Instead of the nation above all states, he changed it to the nation. Everything about all the countries of the world. Above all other nations.
Oh. So you see what happened this phrase that started meaning one thing, unification. Yeah. It came the opposite.
This is what the Nazis did. False words. Lies. They would bend words to obscure the truth of what they were doing.
Extermination, they'd call it solution. By doing that, as he saw it, they were able to convince good, sane people his neighbors to go along with the genocide. Then I realized that something must be done to make language more to a teenager. Words were the problem.
Words made people do cruel things to each other. They dare our society apart. Words were dangerous instruments. They caused violence.
They caused wars. So when he saw the Chinese symbol from man, he thought, this might be the answer. And the idea came up to me that I would invent symbols. Like the Chinese symbols, but even clearer.
Because they're so simple and pictorial that even children can read them. If he could sit down and work it out, he would look at the symbol and know what it meant instantly, regardless of what language you spoke. You wouldn't even need words which he felt could be manipulated. You could just have the symbol and get straight to the truth of the matter.
And the way he saw it, right off the bat, you'd have all of these benefits. Frenchmen and Finns, Englishmen and the Stoios. Language barriers would be at the window. Everything from traffic accidents to health problems.
Could be avoided, he thought. If his symbol system would just be adopted. He had this vision that high-level political and commercial negotiations would be done in symbols. Did he say anything as grand as like war wouldn't happen?
Constantly. And even of course. He reckon Hitler wouldn't have happened basically, but if the German people had understood the symbols, they wouldn't have copped Goebbels propaganda. That's a pretty tall order, but it did seem to be what he thought.
Everything could be cured by the system. He's the biggest dreamer ever. How did he go about doing this? He started working out what the basic lines and shapes would be.
He also wanted to make sure you could produce it with a typewriter, so it had to be a limited set of shapes out of which everything could be created. Okay, so he works on it for seven years. Seven years. And he comes up with that.
Wow, that is a big one. This massive book called. List Symbolics. Some Anthology.
A logical writing for an illogical world. That's a don't. Where he explains the logic of his system. For example here, he's a symbol for sword, which looks exactly like a sword.
And then the sword plus a forward arrow means attack. I buy it. And then if you see a symbol for sword and another symbol for sword, and they're crossed, that means war. So that's the idea that you take these basic elemental symbols and combine them.
Exactly. Alright, here's another one. This symbol here is like the top half of a circle. Like a little rainbow, but just one line.
That means mind. Mind. It looks like the top of a skull. Now, if I were to take that symbol from mind, and I would go like this, or to put inside it, the question mark, that means I don't know or I'm doubt.
And there are also ways to indicate verbs and adjectives and first person, second person, the past, the future. But kind of the one thing that it did that no other language or symbol system or anything has attempted to do, at least as far as I know, is that it would make clear when something was what he called a human evaluation, basically an opinion. What you would do is you put this little V symbol and you put it above this symbol. And why V?
Well, because you know how V is balanced on a point and it's unstable at wobbles to him that represents opinions, human evaluations, anything that comes out of mind. Or take metaphors. If you say something which is a metaphor. The top four, as he says.
You must put up the metaphor sign. To alert the reader, do not take this literally. Stop without a head. Not exactly bulletproof, but I can see the thinking there.
I actually think it's pretty impressive. Okay, so what happens next? Well, after he finishes this, and he and his wife are living in Australia at the time. They spent all their savings on producing this book and sent it out to professors, government officials.
Heads of state. Something like 6,000 people. And they waited for the orders to start rolling in. And no response from anybody.
And then they had nothing. Can't say I didn't see that coming. Yeah. And with great disappointment, Charles went to work as a welder in a factory.
A general notice holens. He was working on the production line almost as a robot. And a year later, his wife died. You know, he had fought in World War I.
He had been in a concentration camp. He had lived in exile, but he says this was the lowest point of his life. Until one day, 1971, as he said, this letter floated onto his desk with this picture of this beautiful, dimpled child proudly using his symbols. Yeah, it was a poster.
A poster. A poster. This is Shirley. Shirley McNaughton.
And at the time she was a nurse at a place called the OCCC. The Ontario Crippled Children's Centre. A name that we were very happy to leave behind us. They've since changed from the name.
They started there in 1968. And Shirley was part of this group of teachers and nurses who worked with these kids who suffered from cerebral palsy. If you have cerebral palsy, it's the motor control from the brain that's been affected. Which meant that they had trouble moving their arms or legs.
And even in some cases, they couldn't speak. They couldn't form words. And then a film that was made of this class. You see these young kids.
Children from five to seven. All sitting in wheelchairs. And they're watching the teacher. She talks to them.
And you hear them try to talk to her. But they can't. These kids had no way to communicate. Couldn't they learn how to read?
They could if you knew what they were understanding and they have no way to communicate that to you. The only thing all these kids had were pictures that they could point at. They had a picture of a toilet, a picture of food, a picture of a drink, a picture of a bed. They were limited to that kind of communication.
But I knew they were bright. But if they couldn't move and they couldn't speak, how would you know? My insight on that was the twinkle in their eyes. But she says a lot of doctors and nurses at the time.
Thought I was crazy. Thought there really wasn't much going on inside these kids heads. You know they thought I was projecting into the children. What she needed she said was a way to get through to them.
And so one day she was at the library with a colleague. And they come across this dusty old volume that had never been checked out called, you guessed it. The symbolics. And what did you first think when you saw it?
Oh boy, can I get back to the group? How fast can I get back to the group with this? This is exactly what we need. So do you remember what the first symbols were?
I think it was I and you. I looked kind of like a standing person. An upright line. A small horizontal line at the base.
Yup. Next to it. The number one. Which means first person.
You was the same symbol but with the number two for second person. And then they had to have a verb. And it was love. Heart with an arthurt.
So now they've got a sentence. I love you. One of our mothers since the happiest moment she's ever had with her child was when her child came home and said, I love you. You know, so.
Shirley and her staff started to add more symbols. They caught on. And pretty soon they'd created this giant laminated chart. It had I and you and he and she.
We and they then it had mother, father, grandma, grandpa, doctor, nurse, teacher, therapist, postman, fireman, librarian, dentist. Eventually they added adjectives. Happy, sad, and frustrated. All the verbs we had loved and like and hate, want, need, understand.
Pretty soon? The kids started to do amazing things with symbol combinations. They started to improvise. Shirley remembers asking one kid.
Terry Martin, what did he want to be for Halloween? Terry pointed first at the symbol for creature. A creature, not a person. Then he pointed at the symbol for drinks.
Then? Blood. Then? Night.
A creature who drinks blood at night. He wanted to be a vampire. He spelt a new word. It sounds like an explosion with these kids.
It was. It was. For the first time she says she could actually talk to them. Like, know who they were.
Yeah, you got to know who the leaders were in the classroom. Those who wanted to help others. Those who copied others. And it was around then that she and the other teachers decided to send Charles Bliss that letter.
We were sharing our excitement for this gift he'd given to the children. You know, he was in Australia. He was an elderly man. We had no thought that he would come and visit us.
You know, didn't enter our mind. But Charles Bliss, he was delighted. He had battled for so long a recognition. And now he had it.
He mortgages his house and flies over. I was so happy there and I played my mondreline and told him jokes. He dances around and kisses everybody effusively. And then laughed and laughed and laughed at halo.
He had long conversations with the kids. In symbols. He was very happy about the children. Joey.
Joey. That's it. But somewhere along the way, he notices something. Surely, surely, and the teachers had begun to...
Augment. The system. They'd begun to add their own symbols. Such as.
The opposite meaning symbol. This allowed the kids to take one of the standard symbols and just invert the meaning. Opposite of happy. Sad.
Opposite of up, down, opposite of in... Oh, you know her. This would effectively double the number of adjectives. Which would be great for the kids.
And we developed rules. For how to combine symbols, for how to be more precise with the symbols. She threw in some new pronouns that were missing. The difference between he and him and his.
In short. I would make the adaptations I needed to make. From the very beginning we were using it to meet the children's needs. There are specific needs.
And of course that is not what he had in his mind. He wanted a system that was universal. Every change that she made created like a separate dialect. He would get very emotional about it.
So when he got back to Australia, he started writing all these letters. Basically taking issue with her changes and her failure to understand how his system works. Meanwhile, thanks to Shirley, word about Bliss' symbols had spread way beyond Canada. To Hungary, France, Sweden, Israel, Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe.
And then Argentina, Brazil, Finland, Iceland, Italy, Bermuda, Guam, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Hungary, Switzerland, Venezuela, Madagascar, Yugoslavia. It spread to all these places. Yeah. And in each place the symbols would inevitably get tweaked to suit that country.
For example, in Israel, because the writing goes from right to left. Yeah. The Bliss symbols went from right to left. But what really pained him the most, what really got him was that these teachers were using his symbols.
As a step toward English. Or French or German or Hebrew or whatever. It was just a way to get the kids to their native languages. The teachers always saw it.
The way they saw it, you start the kids on Bliss. And then you introduce reading and letters and eventually they're fully literate. At which point, you don't need the Bliss symbols. This was the ultimate insult to him.
They were using his system to bring these kids back to the very thing that he was trying to get everyone away from. Evil words. Yeah. If I can't explain it to them.
They don't want to listen to me. They look through me. What should I do? I don't know.
I don't know. And it's right about this point in the story. That you start to hear a different Charles place. Yes.
She'll make note of her. She'll write it in my book. She'll write it in my book. She'll write it in my book.
Is she saying perverted? Yeah. She smiles. She beguys.
She lies. He kept sending Shirley and the other teachers letters. And the letters got angrier and angrier. This was not what the language was for.
This was a universal language that had nothing to do with spoken language. You are ruining my system. You are abusing it. And eventually he decided to take matters into his own hands.
And he traveled back to Canada. And he started going to the various centers where the kids were using his symbols. And saying horrible things about me. And getting them very upset.
That's when I got upset. I got upset when he got them upset. Not long after, Shirley receives a son. I have taken to court the OCCC in the BC.
Wait. He sued them? I added two more defendants. Mrs.
Gilliam ignored him. On the tapes, they even suggested that he's going to have Shirley put away. For life. Wow.
Why was he so upset with her in particular? Well, because by this time she started... The International Organization. BCI.
Bliss Nimble Communications International. And she felt like this was a total unique and powerful tool, which could and should transform lives around the world. And more teachers needed to adopt it. Definitely.
What was he asking for? He wanted us to use the symbols in his way. So in 1975 the BCI won a license agreement to use the symbols in the workbooks for the kids. But Charles Bliss.
They should all be pumped. Didn't give up. They should all be pumped. He published endless tirades and sent them out to anybody who had listened.
Please unite. In helping to educate all falsification of the bliss symbol system. All in all, this went on for over a decade. And the administration of the program, I'm sure he was working, was desperate to make him go away.
He had basically destroyed the program. And so in 1982 he and the BCI finally come to an agreement. It was a financial settlement that satisfied him. What was the financial settlement?
$160,000. Wow. You know, we were a little program in the basement of the Ontario Cripple Children's Centre. We were just a classroom.
Wow, then. So a guy who wanted to save the world ends up robbing a bunch of disabled kids? I mean, that's kind of putting it crudely, but that's how it feels. And basically that's the, yeah.
Did the symbols ever go anywhere? Well, there was a lot of excitement about it in the beginning, but it never spread very far. It's used now at a few schools in Canada and Sweden, a couple other places. But it never went very far because he was constantly taking it down at every turn.
But here's what I find most surprising. When I talked to Shirley, she didn't have any bitterness toward him, not even in the worst moments. When we were having the final legal action, we'd go through that in the morning. As the lawyers were packing up their papers, Charles Bliss would reach across the table and he'd say, Shirley, will you help me?
So she'd go to lunch with him, sit with him. And then he asked me if I would come to his hotel that night and put the ear drops in his ears. And I did that every night. He was involved with this thing.
That's just the way it was. And it wasn't just that she takes care of people for a living. You know, she felt and still feels that Charles Bliss had created something really new in the world. She even told me that when she uses Bliss symbols, she actually thinks differently.
Yes, definitely. Definitely. What's different? I just think so much more about what a word means.
And it's like poetry in its purest form. I've been playing with stained glass down here in my retirement. And you can just take the symbols and put them into one composite. And they say things that only art can say.
It's beautiful. They transmit a meaning that is beyond any words. Thanks to producer Tim Howard and Erica O'Krant, author of In the Land of Invented Languages. We'll be right back.
Bliss is having friends and family you can rely on. My name is Libby Graham and I am calling from the side of the road in Dallas, Texas, awaiting rescue. This is Ginger, a socially awkward introvert from Cabot Arkansas. Bliss is one day in which I do not have to interact with another human being.
Bliss is political ignorance. This is Mahamudra Moya. Bliss is your baby's name. Hi, this is Erica O'Krant.
Radio Lab is supported in part. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. Information about Sloan can be found at www.sloane.org.
That works for you. Thanks. And this message. Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Shh, shh, shh, shh. Let me just say record. Okay, now what were you saying? Come on, say this name a moment ago.
Hey, I'm Janet O'Ran. I'm Robert Kowat. This is Radio Lab and today. Bliss.
In our last segment, we met a guy who dreamt of a perfect world where words can never muck things up. Got a little carry away. Yeah, so let's forget about dreams. Forget about it.
Now we're going to look for perfection right here in the physical world. Okay, so this story. And we're going to do it with a perfect person. Lottie F.
It's February 9, 1880. Six miles outside the tiny town of Jericho, Vermont. And we're on a farm, a family farm, a Bentley family farm, and this scrawny 15 year old kid named Wilson gets a microscope from his mother. So it's February and it's Vermont.
And so naturally the first thing this kid does is he grabs a handful of snow, picks out a single flake, and he puts it under the microscope. And what he sees is the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. It's ethereal and perfect. He calls them masterpieces as if they're these great works of art.
Because of that in his 15 year old diary. Well, looking back, he talked about that moment and what he was thinking when he sort of first saw it. But obviously, within minutes or maybe even seconds, these masterpieces just disappeared without leaving any evidence that they ever existed. They just sort of evaporate.
And as he remembers it, he sort of decides then and there that he's going to dedicate his whole life to documenting these masterpieces. Otherwise, no one will ever know they even existed. He's going to spend his whole life documenting snowflakes. Yeah, it's a good life, Jad.
And it pays well. Right, that's exactly what his father said. His father thought he was lazy and didn't want to do the farming chores. He thought he'd melt the goats and he goes, no.
Yeah, the beauty. The beauty. Right, right. And apparently he was really good at digging potatoes, but he was just sort of busy futzing around with his microscope.
I don't like this kid. I don't like him. Friends your work ethic. It's so fun.
So he takes his microscope and he moves it to this unheated woodshed behind the house. And he starts sketching these snowflakes. And while he's sketching, he can't even breathe because he was worried that his breath would melt his specimen. So he's sort of holding his breath and drawing these extremely complex crystals that can take you maybe an hour to draw.
But depending on the temperature of the humidity, the size of the crystal, he had at most he had five minutes. At the end of that he looks at them all and he's not satisfied. He just felt like he wasn't doing it justice. What he calls his miracles of beauty.
So Bentley persuades his mother who persuades his father to buy him a camera. Wait, wait, wait, wait. 1880, we're in February 1880. Have we entered into the era of picture taking?
Just barely. And for a farming family this was a lot of money. But they buy it for him and he gets it and he sort of jerry rigs it to the microscope. And at age 19, Wilson Bentley is the first person ever in history to photograph a snowflake.
Okay, I'm going to cue the snowflake celebration to cure. Right. From then on, basically for the next 46 winters until he died. Every snowfall, every blizzard, this Bentley would stand in the doorway of his little shack holding out a wooden tray with thick mittens because he would wear these thrums like oven mitts to make sure that none of his body heat would kind of leak out and inadvertently melt any of his body.
And inadvertently melt any of the snow. So he'd sort of stand there and sort of give it a once over with his eye. If nothing was promising, he basically had a turkey feather and he would sort of just wipe it clean with his turkey feather until he did find something he liked. And then he would take this tiny little wooden rod and he would just sort of really delicately tap the center of the crystal and really, really, really lift it off and then transfer it onto a glass slide so that he could put it under the microscope and he could photograph it.
Oh, of course I'd like to basically photograph about 5,000 snow crystals. He was just a farmer doing this kind of as a hobby, but he sold copies of these photos for 5 cents a pop to places like Harvard and the British Museum and the US Weather Bureau, research journals, magazines like Nature and National Geographic. I mean, you've already seen the photos. You've gotten them on a Christmas card, they're on your ugly Christmas sweater and your closet somewhere.
Robert's wearing a shirt with them on right now. They're everywhere. They're beautiful, symmetrical, really clean and complex. A lot of the greatest scientists who ever lived, like Descartes and Kepler and Hook, they all tried to sketch and draw and kind of capture the essence of snowflakes, but none of them could do it as well.
As this one obsessive loner from Jerick Overmont whose photos were perceived to be kind of more faithful to nature than anybody else's. But that was until this other guy came on the scene, this German guy. Cue the other guy, Germanic theme music. Yes.
He was a German neurologist named Gustav Helman. Gustav Helman? Not of the manes fame, I don't believe. I have even a lot of that actually.
So Helman, is he a contemporary of Bentley? Yeah, he is. He's working on his own book about weather. He hires a micro photographer who's another German guy named Richard Newhouse.
A micro photographer who kept on his desk. He's a microscobber himself. He just takes normal size photographs. He hires a guy.
They take a bunch of photos using basically similar technology, a camera and a microscope essentially. But what they find is totally different. They do not find the elegant symmetrical ideal snow crystals that Bentley found. The crystals they found were flawed, lopsided, usually broken.
I think it was a Martian who had only ever seen glossy fashion magazines had just been given some random family photo album. It was like, oh, wow, they're not so pretty. These are kind of ugly. These humans, they're not all symmetrical.
These Germans, they basically called them out. They basically thought Bentley was a fraud. There was a particular way that Bentley prepared his photographs. What he would do is he would use a penknife to scrape the negative around the snow crystal, which would be a nice black background because he thought it would put it in maybe stark relief.
The German guy said it's misleading, that it mutilates the snowflakes away. So he's photographing these snowflakes and then significantly messing with the photograph. Exactly right. So here's a quote from the photographer who said, in many images, Bentley did not limit himself to improving the outlines.
He let his knife play deep inside the heart of the crystals so that fully arbitrary figures emerged. I don't know. That doesn't seem so no longer a candidate. That's the question.
So they basically lob this and this is kind of going in these journals. Bentley basically launches a counterattack. And what he says is that, in fact, those guys are wrong, that not correcting your photographs was, and he used this word perverse to him. Why wouldn't you remove specks of dust or other imperfections?
Why photograph a broken snowflake when you could photograph a complete one? So this is a quote from Bentley. He said, a true scientist, which is above all to have his photographs as true to nature as possible. And if retouching will help in this respect, then it is fully justified.
So he thought his retouched snowflakes were truer than the normal ones? Yeah, exactly. The scientist is supposed to be kind of this very experienced, almost like a sage, who has seen every different variation on a snowflake. But Ken sort of bring that all together in one drawing, one sketch, one photograph, and that's the true snowflake.
So if I brought him a slightly gloppy snowflake and said, look, this is what fell on my nose, and this is a true snowflake because it actually fell from the sky and it was un-enhanced. He would say, Robert, you're an amateur. This is not good work. This is an aberration.
This is an abnormality. Why would you choose to highlight an abnormality as opposed to this true ideal snowflake? And does that one exist? I mean, that's the key question for me.
Does the ideal snowflake exist in nature? You think there are such things. I am exquisitely beautiful. I would like to think there are.
No, so I think if my facts are right, but the world snowflake expert is actually in Pasadena, California. All right. Check, check, check, check, check. And sunny Southern California?