Bliss
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Radio from WNYC. Rewind. Okay, hello, hello. Hello.

Hello! Hey, how are you? We are super, super excited to talk with you. Oh, same with me. I'm sorry about the delay and so on. Oh, that's fine. Quite some busy days. Life is crazy. Life is crazy. Yeah, I know. But you were so enthusiastic, so I need to talk to these guys. They really mean it. This is Alex. Alexander Gamme. Gamme. Are you Norwegian all the way back? Yeah. 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 into the studio because he made a video last year on one of his trips. I've got to tell you, this video, it's maybe the most amazing internet video I have ever seen. I think so too. Oh, my God.

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 in his right hand. Where is he exactly? Antarctica. He's on a three-month trek to the South Pole and back by himself.

And what he'd 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 to lighten your load? Yeah. You know, because every ounce of unneeded 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. Then I lost almost 25 kilos. 55 pounds. He's exhausted. Oh, my God.

He's come upon his last cache. So on the last cache where this video is captured. What you see is Alex kneel in the snow, start to dig. I'm telling that 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. But there's always room to jump.

He hopes it's something good. So he digs up this bag of stuff, starts rifling through it. Some Vaseline, some zinc ointment. It's just a mess. Nothing. It's pretty much all trash. But then... Yeah! Yeah!

What? What is it? He holds up a double bag of cheese doodles. Then he throws it up in the air. And then, this is my favorite part, he just freezes. And he's staring off into the distance, almost like, did that happen? Is it real? So he starts to dig some more.

And then... What was it this time? Huge chocolate bar! It's milk chocolate! And then it's just like... You find some Mentos. There are Mentos! 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 a 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 somehow stumbled into this moment of perfection. It's just like a perfect situation. Ha ha ha!

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 Radiolab, 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. Perfect worlds. The kind of bliss that slips right through your fingers. And the kind of bliss...

It just might last. And last. And last. All right, we're going to begin with a story that kind of inspired this show. We would have never done a show about the word bliss were it not for the following story, which is about...

A-Bliss. A? What do you mean, A-Bliss? That'll make sense in just a second. Story comes from our producer, Tim Howard, and it begins with a box of tapes. All right, so check it out. We're in my office, and you've got a rectangular package here. It is a very old-looking box. It doesn't look like much. It's just about 15 cassettes.

Tape number six, singing and playing to friends in America. Okay, so this is Charles. Charles Casey O'Bliss.

An amazing character. And that's Richard. Richard Ewer. He's the fellow who gave me the cassettes. He was a friend of Charles. Yeah. So these were just, like, sitting in his attic or something? Garage, I think. He looked like, I suppose, a little gnome, a little leprechaun almost. He was short, bald and laughter the whole time. He was a lovable character, simple as that. This is my favourite one.

Wait a second. Just 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.

We can start the 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. And his name is Karl Blitz. Not Charles Bliss? Not Charles Bliss. Karl Blitz. B-L-I-T-Z. That's his original name. And little Karl... Was fascinated by tales of discovery and adventure...

My name is Erica Okrent. Erica wrote about Charles Bliss in this 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 polar 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 their warm homes, their secure existence, and went out into the Arctic, into the ice and snow, in almost certain deaths.

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...

And then, everything changed.

In 1938, 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 wish, one 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 Claire, my good wife, smuggled my mandolin and my guitar into the concentration camp.

And you could say that it was here in Buchenwald that Karl started to develop his ideas about language, about the ways that you can manipulate words.

For instance, there was this one song that all the prisoners sang. The Buchenwaldlied, one of the saddest songs I can ever make. It 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 sad lyrics 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 in the darkest and the most terrible holes on earth. And on the flip side, every evening...

The guards would march all the prisoners outside, force them to stand there in the cold in front of these loudspeakers, make them listen to these speeches. Speeches of Hitler and Goebbels screaming Nazi slogans. Like... Which means Germany above all. There are certain words which make you mad, which drives you mad.

But after about a year... His wife somehow wrangled a British visa for him and he... Gets out. Thank heavens those dreadful times are gone. And now I can play here for you an improvisation as it comes into my mind. In 1939, he went to Britain... And got a job as a manager 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...

And every time he'd introduce himself to somebody new, they'd shudder. That can't be your name. Because of like Blitzkrieg, that association? Yes. You can't go around here in Great Britain with a name like Blitz. And so I changed from the warlike Blitz to the peaceful Blitz.

That was how he became Charles Bliss. Bliss has all the right associations. So he went forward with the feeling 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 them 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 what I did not 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 the 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, Deutschland über alles, you know, Germany above all. That phrase? Mm-hmm.

Charles knew that it actually predated the Nazis. That was coined a hundred years earlier, in 1848. And originally it was meant as a rallying cry to bring together all of these separate principalities. The kingdom of Bavaria, the kingdom of Saxonia. That spoke German, but these were not one country. So when they said Deutschland über alles, it meant unification. Unified Germany. The nation above the states. Oh, so it wasn't necessarily an aggressive thing? No.

No. But Hitler turned this around. Hitler changed the meaning. Instead of the nation above all states, he changed it to the nation above all other nations. So you see what happened. This phrase that started meaning one thing, unification, became the opposite. Yeah. This is what the Nazis did. False words.

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.

And I realized that something must be done to make language more true to nature. Words were the problem. Words made people do cruel things to each other. They tear our society apart. Words were dangerous instruments. They cause violence. They cause wars. So when he saw the Chinese symbol for man, he thought...

This might be the answer. And the idea came up to me that I should invent symbols. Like the Chinese symbols, but even clearer. Which are 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. Wow.

And the way he saw it, right off the bat you'd have all of these benefits. Frenchmen and Finns, Englishmen and Estonians. Language barriers would be out 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 reckoned Hitler wouldn't have happened, basically, that if the German people had understood these symbols, they wouldn't have copped Goebbels' propaganda. Now, that's a pretty tall order, but it did seem to be what he thought. Everything could be cured by this system. He's the biggest dreamer ever. Yeah.

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.

Wow, that is a big one. This massive book called... Bliss Symbolics. Semantology. Illogical writing for an illogical world. That says it all. Where he explains the logic of his system. For example, here is a symbol for sword, which looks exactly like a sword. And then 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 their cross, that means war. So that's the idea that you take these basic elemental symbols and combine them? Exactly. All right, 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. Ah. Now, if I were to take that symbol for mind and I were to go like this, I were to put inside it,

A question mark? That means... I don't know or... Doubt. 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...

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, you know, basically an opinion. And what you would do is you'd put this little,

this little V symbol, and you put it above the symbol. And why V? Well, because you know how V is balanced on a point and it's unstable, it wobbles. To him, that represents opinions, human evaluations, anything that comes out of the mind. Hmm.

Or take metaphors. If you say something which is a metaphor... Metaphor, as he says. You must put up the metaphor sign. To alert the reader, do not take this literally. Stop! Metaphor ahead! 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.

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. At General Motors Holdens, 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. This, as he said, this letter floated onto his desk. A letter that would change everything when Radiolab continues.

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Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radiolab. And we're talking about bliss. We've got the story of Charles Bliss, whose name inspired the show, who had the dream of inventing a universal symbolic language. Now, before the break, he'd reached a real low point in his quest when all of a sudden, 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 the name. I 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? Really? 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. Small horizontal line at the base. Yep. Next to it, the number one. Which means first person. You is the same symbol, but with a number two for second person. And then they had to have a verb. And it was love. Heart with an arrow through it. So now they've got a sentence. I love you.

One of our mothers says 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, 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. You had love and like.

Pretty soon... 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. Right. He wanted to be a vampire. Ah. 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, it didn't enter our mind. But

But Charles Bliss? He was delighted. He had battled for so long for recognition, and now he had it. He mortgages his house and flies over. I was so happy there, and I played my mandolin and told him jokes. He dances around and kisses everybody effusively. And they laughed and laughed and laughed their head off. He had long conversations with the kids. In symbols.

He was very happy about the children. Joy! Joy! That's just joy. But somewhere along the way, he notices something. Shirley 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 Bliss's standard symbols and just invert the meaning. Opposite of happy, sad. Opposite of up, down. Opposite of in, out. It seemed to 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. Yeah. She'd throw 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. Their 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's symbols had spread way beyond Canada to Hungary, France, Sweden, Israel, Zimbabwe...

Zimbabwe? Yeah. And then Argentina, Brazil, Finland, Iceland, Italy, Bermuda, Guam, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Hungary, Switzerland, Venezuela, Madagascar, Yugoslavia. It's 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, 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. And it's right about this point in the story that you start to hear

A different Charles Place. Is he saying perverted? Yeah. 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 received the summons. I have taken to court the OCCC and the BCR. Wait, he sued them? Yeah. I added two more defendants.

On the tapes, he even suggests 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'd started... The international organization, BCI. Bliss Symbol Communications International. And... She felt like this was a totally unique and powerful tool which could...

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 pulped!

didn't give up. He published endless tirades and sent them out to anybody who would listen. All in all, this went on for over a decade. And

The administration of the program where Shirley 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.

You know, we were a little program in the basement of the Ontario Crippled Children's Centre. We were, you know, just a classroom. Wow. 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. Basically, that's the...

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, and 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 eardrops in his ears, and I did that every night. He was...

with this thing. That's just the way it was. And it wasn't just that she takes care of people for a living. 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. Really? Definitely. What's different? Oh, 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 Okrent.

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 Mahmoud from Moriad. Bliss is your baby sleeping in your arms. Wait, wait, wait, don't. Shh. Let me just hit record. Okay, and what were you saying spontaneously a moment ago? Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radiolab, and today... Bliss. Bliss.

And in our last segment, we met a guy who dreamt of a perfect world where words could never muck things up. Got a little carried away. Yeah. So let's forget about dreams. Forget about them. 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 the perfect person. Latif Nasr. It begins with a birthday present. It's February 9th, 1880, six miles outside the tiny town of Jericho, Vermont.

And we're on a farm, a family farm, the 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. He calls them 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, Jed, and it pays well. Right. That's exactly what his father said. His father thought he was, you know, he was just lazy and didn't want to do the farming chores. I see. His father says, milk the goats. And he goes, no, dad, the beauty, the beauty. Right, right. And apparently he was really good at digging potatoes, but he just sort of was so busy futzing around with his microscope that he, you know.

I don't like this kid. I don't like him. It offends your work ethic. It does. So what happens next? So he takes his microscope and he moves it to this unheated woodshed behind the house. And he starts sketching these snowflakes, right? 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, the humidity, the size of the crystal, he had at most five minutes. Right?

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, you know, what he calls these like miracles of beauty. So Bentley persuades his mother, who persuades his father, to buy him a camera. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. 1880. We're in February 1880. Have we entered into in the era of picture taking? Just, just barely. And for a farming family, this was like 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 music here. Right.

From then on, basically for the next 46 winters until he died, every snowfall, every blizzard, this guy Bentley would stand in the doorway of his little shack, holding out a wooden tray...

with thick mittens, because he would wear these, they were almost like oven mitts, to make sure that none of his body heat would kind of leak out 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 this 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 gently 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.

Over the course of his life, he basically photographed about 5,000 snow crystals. For his whole life, he was just a farmer doing this kind of as a hobby. But he sold copies of these photos for five cents a pop to places like Harvard and the British Museum and the U.S. Weather Bureau, research journals, magazines like Nature and National Geographic. And I mean,

You've already seen the photos. Like, you've gotten them on a Christmas card. They're on your, like, ugly Christmas sweater in your closet somewhere. Robert's wearing a shirt with them on right now. Yeah.

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 Hooke, 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 Jericho, Vermont, 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. Yes. He was a German meteorologist named Gustav Hellmann. Gustav Hellmann. Not of the mayonnaise fame, I don't believe. No.

I hadn't even thought of that, actually. So Helmut, is he a contemporary of Bentley? Yeah, he is. And he's working on his own book about weather.

And so he hires a kind of a micro photographer who's another German guy named Richard Newhouse. A micro, so a very teeny photographer who he kept on his desk. Yeah, he's a microscopic himself and he just takes normal sized photographs. Anyhow. He hires this guy and 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 like broken. And the way I think of it, it was like a Martian who had only ever seen like glossy fashion magazines had just been given some like random family photo album. And it was like, oh, wow, this is, they're not so pretty. Like these are kind of ugly. These humans, these humans, they're not all symmetrical. But 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 pen knife to scrape the negative around the snow crystal, which is what gave it that kind of nice black background because he thought it would kind of put it in maybe starker relief. And the German guys said that it's misleading, that it kind of mutilates the snowflakes. Wait, so he's photographing these snowflakes and then...

Significantly messing with the photograph? Exactly right. Exactly right. So here's a quote from the photographer who said, quote, Oh. Oh, so he's... Well, I don't know. That doesn't seem so... It's no longer a candid, is it? Well...

Well, that's the question. So they basically lob this, and this is kind of going in these journals. But 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, like perverse, 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 wishes 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, 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 can 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's you know it was an unenhanced

He would say that's...

I mean, that's the key question for me. Like, does the ideal snowflake exist in nature? You think there are such things as exquisitely beautiful snowflakes? I would like to think that there are. No, so I think if my facts are right, the world snowflake expert is actually in Pasadena, California. All right. Check, check, check, check, check. In sunny Southern California? Yeah. I'm wearing a T-shirt. I have...

sunscreen lathered and I am going to talk to the world authority on snow. How are you? His name is Ken Liebrecht. He's a professor of physics at Caltech. He is in a way he's like the modern day Wilson Bentley because he takes a ton of snowflake pictures. I've taken about 10,000 now. And he actually makes snowflakes. Oh yeah.

Okay, wow. So this is a giant tank. This is of nitrogen here? Never mind that. Okay. And to get to your question about the ideal snowflake, a few things. So number one, there are a bajillion different kinds. Dendritic, crystal stellar dendrites, needles and columns and hollow columns and dissected plates. So that's one thing. The second thing is that.

Snowflakes are never static. They're never one thing. So at every single moment as it falls to the earth, it's either growing or shrinking, depending on the kind of trajectory through the different pockets of weather as it's moving down. So there is no real platonic ideal form of a snowflake because it's so in flux. I mean, there's no such thing as a perfect snowflake. But...

That doesn't stop Ken Liebrecht from looking. You know, I tried up in Tahoe and Japan, Vermont, Michigan. He travels all over the world looking for Bentley's perfect flakes. Alaska, I've been to Alaska, Sweden. But my favorite spot is northern Ontario. A little town called Cochrane. Population 5,487. So where do you go in Cochrane? Do you just, just anywhere? They're just falling all over the place? Mostly it's the, it's the parking lot of my, my hotel. He says there's a lot of waiting involved in this.

It only really snows well about once a week. Even then, things have to be Goldilocks perfect. If the clouds are too high, then they evaporate a little on the way down. They don't look very pretty. Or... If the clouds are too light or too heavy... That's bad, too. And a lot of times, the temperature's wrong. If you want those Christmas card supermodel snowflakes...

You need to have exactly minus 15. That's five degrees Fahrenheit. You need to have high humidity, not so much wind, so that they'll putter down slowly and have more time to grow. But every once in a while, I mean, when the conditions are right, you go outside all, you know, hopeful and anticipating. And it's like, oh, crap. There's nothing garbage out here. So you go back inside and read some more email and you come back a half an hour later.

Nope, still lousy. And a half hour later, nope, still lousy. And you do this for hours, and then all of a sudden they'll get really good. And then I'm just out there frantically trying to collect as many as I can. One of the things I like to think about is, here I am with my little piece of cardboard in the middle of a continent where it's snowing all the time. And so I am catching some incredibly small number of these things for a brief period of time.

and getting some really cool pictures. And so you kind of wonder what else is out there? What are you missing? I mean, imagine just all the beautiful little works of art that are just falling down.

totally unnoticed and then they just disappear. I mean stuff that is far prettier than the pictures I have because they're out there. You know they're out there statistically. They're out there and so there's just an awful lot of really gorgeous things. Like you say, they're just totally ephemeral and you'll never see them. And they're falling constantly. You sort of want to just stop the world and go look at them. Yeah.

Thanks a lot to Fnasar and to Ken Liebrich, who wrote the book The Secret Life of a Snowflake. This is Matt and Neely Dawson from Asheville, North Carolina, and bliss is this sound. That's the sound of my seven-month-old daughter reacting to my puppy dog licking her feet. Hi, my name is Igor, and I'm calling from Novi Sad, Serbia.

Bliss is Indiana Jones! All three parts. Hi Radiolab, this is Steve Strogatz. Bliss is the taste of hot pastrami at Katz's Deli in the Lower East Side of New York City. We live four or five hours away from New York and don't get there very often, and so I spend a lot of time in between visits thinking about that first taste of the hot pastrami.

So for me, that's bliss. I get to think about some kind of almost unattainable perfection.

Except then it is attainable. I just show up and there it is. This is Mary Roach and I'm in Oakland, California and I have a list of bliss. My bliss list. Number one, laughing uncontrollably. Number two, zero gravity. Number four, the first ten seconds in a hot, hot bath. Number nine, a raw oyster. Very fresh, but no larger than an infant's ear.

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