Floris Winckel and Snowflake Science

In my doctoral research on the history of snowflake science, Vincent Schaefer plays an important role for his contributions to the field in the 1940s. His 1941 discovery of a method to preserve snow crystals indefinitely by fossilizing them in plastic garnered much attention both within the scientific community and outside of it. Among his papers in the M.E. Grenander Special Collections and Archives, I was able to browse through dozens of letters from colleagues, educators, and schoolchildren seeking advice on how to create their own snowflake fossils. Six years later, another discovery—that dry ice can be used to induce snowfall in supercooled clouds—would cause the volume of incoming mail to balloon even more dramatically, with correspondents ranging from farmers to government agencies calling on his expertise in weather control. Many of these letters have also made it into his papers, alongside the numerous reports and depositions on the topic of experimental meteorology that he would produce over subsequent decades.

Despite his meteoric rise from a General Electric surface chemist with no high school diploma to an internationally renowned meteorologist and weather-control expert, Schaefer maintained close relationships to his snowflake colleagues. One of these colleagues was Marcel de Quervain, a Swiss snow and avalanche researcher. He and Schaefer worked together on developing an international snow classification between 1948 and 1954, as well as exchanging research expertise between their countries, each hosting the other when they traveled between the US and Switzerland. Their collaboration was a microcosm of the cross-Atlantic exchange in snow and ice expertise during the postwar period.

But Schaefer’s letters and journals also provide glimpses into the more personal and cultural aspects of their collaboration. Of all the letters addressed to Schaefer, my favorite was sent by De Quervain in late November 1948, after he had returned from a visit to the General Electric Research Lab in Schenectady. It hints at what it must have been like for a researcher working in a small Swiss mountain town to experience the US. “To learn,” he reveals, “that between the broad highways, the flickering advertisings, and the immense buildings of American cities, there are homes as yours with beautiful family life was a result of our trip as important as the agreement on the snow classification.” As a researcher who also grew up in Switzerland, visiting the East Coast for the first time, I felt a moment of mutual understanding reading these words three-quarters of a century later.

This report is reprinted from the Fall 2024 History Newsletter.