Give a snow globe a shake, and for a few quiet seconds you're watching a tiny winter storm. Kids love them, collectors hunt for them, and every holiday season they come out of the attic. There's a charming story about how they were invented by accident. Is it true?
Partly. An Austrian surgical instrument maker named Erwin Perzy did stumble onto his famous snow globes while trying to make a brighter lamp, and he received the first patent for one. But he didn't invent the idea. Snow globes were already on display at the Paris World's Fair in 1878, years before Perzy made his.
The Paperweights of Paris
The oldest clear record comes from the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris. A U.S. government report from the fair described paperweights made of hollow balls filled with water, each containing a man with an umbrella.
The report noted that the balls also held a white powder, which fell like a snowstorm when the paperweight was turned upside down. In other words, the basic snow globe already existed. Nobody knows who made those first ones.
A Happy Accident in Vienna
Near the end of the 1800s, Erwin Perzy was trying to solve a practical problem. He made surgical instruments and wanted an extra-bright light for operating rooms.
He experimented with a cobbler's globe, a water-filled glass flask that had been used since the Middle Ages to focus candlelight. To make it shine brighter, he added tiny particles of different materials to reflect the light. Watching them drift down through the water, he was reminded of falling snow.
The lamp idea faded, but the snow stayed. Perzy built his first scene globe around a small model of the basilica of Mariazell, a famous church in Austria. People loved it right away.
A Family Secret
Demand was so strong that Perzy and his brother Ludwig opened a shop in Vienna. The family business still makes snow globes there today and ships them around the world.
The exact material and method used to make the snow in Perzy globes is still a closely guarded family secret. More than a century later, they still aren't telling.
Snow Globes Come to America
In the United States, the first snow globe patent was filed in 1927 and granted in 1929 to Joseph Garaja of Pittsburgh. That same year, he convinced a company to make a version with a fish swimming underwater.
During the 1940s, American businesses often used snow globes as advertising giveaways. In Europe in the 1940s and 1950s, religious snow globes were popular gifts for Catholic children. In the 1950s, the globes started being made of plastic instead of glass, which made them cheaper and less breakable.
Hollywood made the snow globe a star. The opening of the 1941 classic Citizen Kane features one, and later in the film, Kane holds a snow globe and tearfully whispers Rosebud.
There's a fun behind-the-scenes detail. The special-effects process used for one zoom shot of the snow globe made the picture look grainy. Director Orson Welles solved it by adding falling snow over the top of the shot to hide the grain.
So the snow globe wasn't exactly born by accident, but it did get its big break from one. Not bad for a lamp experiment that never quite worked out.
