Flake News: The Lore of the Snowman, and the Physics of Building One

The best snowman in history is Michelangelo’s, and nobody wrote down what it looked like.

The snowmen

Entries run in the order the snowman was built or first printed. Fiction is filed with fact, because a snowman is the same object in both.

Undated. The first snowman. Built the first winter there was snow, a child and nothing else to do. Nothing of him survives. He melted. This entry is invented. Nothing else here is.

1380. A margin in The Hague. The earliest known drawing of a snowman sits in the margin of a Book of Hours held by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Guinness World Records). Bob Eckstein, who found it, reads it as a satirical cartoon (Christian Science Monitor). The snowman entered history in the margins, where it has been doodling ever since.

20 January 1494. The Medici courtyard, Florence. After heavy snow, Piero de’ Medici commissioned a snow statue from the eighteen-year-old Michelangelo (Wikipedia), an overqualified snowman builder if ever there was one. Vasari sets it in the palace courtyard and does not say what it was (Delaware Art Museum). Ranked first, sight unseen. Nobody can prove it melted badly, and no forger has anything to copy.

1511. Brussels. After six weeks of cold the city built about 110 snowmen, more than half of them rude, and a snow virgin with a unicorn in her lap sat outside the ducal palace as a political complaint (Wikipedia). The spring thaw flooded the town. Brussels had a meltdown, and so did its snowmen.

1827. The word. “Snowman” first turns up in English (Merriam-Webster), 447 years after the drawing, which is a long time to have to point.

1 November 1850. “The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle.” Hawthorne’s story first appears in a New York monthly that day (Wikipedia). Violet and Peony build a snow sister who comes to life. Their father, “the common-sensible man,” sets her on the hearth-rug “right in front of the hissing and fuming stove.” The story ends with him asking for towels (Project Gutenberg). Dads have not changed.

2 March 1861. “The Snow Man.” Andersen’s snowman sees a stove through the window and falls for her (Wikipedia). “The thaw increased, and the Snow Man decreased.” When he collapses, a stove rake is left standing where he was, and the watchdog says that explains the longing (Andersen Centre). He fell for her, then fell. Two stories in eleven years, and the stove wins both.

1921. Not a snowman. “Abominable Snowman” is Henry Newman’s English, in Calcutta’s Statesman, for a name the porters of the Everest reconnaissance gave him, and “abominable” was a mistranslation (Wikipedia). Harsh words for someone nobody has met. It is filed here so nobody writes in.

1950. “Frosty the Snowman.” Walter “Jack” Rollins and Steve Nelson wrote it for Gene Autry after his “Rudolph” was a hit, and Autry’s version reached No. 7 on the Billboard pop chart (Wikipedia). A reindeer opened the door, and a snowman walked through it. There is no business like snow business.

1978 and 1982. The Snowman. Raymond Briggs’s book has no words. The Channel 4 film tells the story with no dialogue except the song “Walking in the Air” (Wikipedia). The boy wakes to find his snowman melted. The physics below says he probably should not have. Snow fair.

1993 and 2009. The standard. U+2603 SNOWMAN entered Unicode 1.1 in 1993 (codepoints.net). U+26C4 SNOWMAN WITHOUT SNOW followed in version 5.2, sixteen years later (codepoints.net). The household meets them in the same order every March. Neither can melt. The worst either can do is turn into a little empty box.

1999 and 2008. Bethel, Maine. The town built Angus, King of the Mountain, at 113 feet 7 inches, then Olympia at 122 feet 1 inch, whom Guinness lists as the tallest snow person (Bangor Daily News). Olympia is a snowwoman. Counted by snowmen, Bethel’s tallest is still Angus, and that is the count I kept. Both, in the end, went downhill.

2013. Olaf. Disney’s snowman in Frozen loves “warm hugs” (Wikipedia). Andersen could have told him how that goes. Somebody give that snowman the cold shoulder.

Building one, by the physics

Packing. Ice below freezing carries a liquid-like film on its surface (Dash, Rempel and Wettlaufer, 2006), and the film is thicker the warmer the ice, as Wettlaufer put it to Fatherly. That film is the glue. Snow just under 0 °C packs. Powder in a hard frost barely sticks to itself. It has commitment issues.

Melting. In 2017 three Leicester undergraduates asked whether Briggs’s snowman would really be gone by morning (Doherty, Kamran and Rhodes). They built it on paper from spheres 80, 60 and 40 cm across, at 200 kg per cubic metre: 82.9 kg in all. With the sun overhead and every watt absorbed, it needs 29 megajoules and about 16 hours to melt. Absorbing half the light, it needs about 30, and the paper adds that little would melt while the boy slept, because it was dark. Their conclusion: “the story need not have a sad ending.” What do you call a snowman in July? A puddle. What do you call one the morning after? Still a snowman, according to Leicester.

I checked their arithmetic twice. The bottom ball is printed as 0.286 cubic metres, and a sphere 80 cm across holds 0.268. Their 82.9 kg uses the right figure, so the slip is in the typing and the total stands.

Lifting. The middle ball of that snowman is 22.6 kg, about a checked suitcase, raised to waist height and set on a ball of snow you would not want to lean on. This is the step at which a family becomes a committee, and somebody’s back becomes a story for Christmas dinner.

Reflecting. Fresh snow reflects about 90 percent of visible light, and charcoal about 4 percent (Wikipedia). That is why the Leicester chart runs past 150 hours. It also means a coal eye soaks up nearly ten times the visible light the snow around it does. A snowman never gives anyone a cold stare. Its eyes are too busy sunbathing.

Forecasting. Most Aprils, Zurich sets fire to a cotton-wool snowman with a dynamite-packed head, the Böögg (swissinfo), and reads the summer from how long the head takes to go. MeteoSwiss’s statistics show “no demonstrable correlation” with summer temperatures. The fastest heads went in 5 minutes, in 1968 and 1971, the slowest in 57, in 2023, and 2026’s in 12 minutes 48 seconds (Bluewin). As forecasts go, it is hit and myth. As a way to lose your head, it is unbeaten.

Every real snowman on this page melted or burned. Frosty said he would be back, and the radio keeps that promise every December.