BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SNOW GLOBE
The way Erwin Perzy's family tells it, if Thomas Edison had designed the better light bulb, Perzy would never have invented the snow globe.
Back in 1900, Erwin Perzy I was working in Vienna as a fine instruments mechanic when a surgeon came to him with a problem. Although the surgeon had electric light bulbs installed in his operating theater, the newly invented product didn't cast a great light. He wanted to know if Perzy could improve on the dim bulbs and make them brighter. So he got to work. As Perzy hunted for inspiration, he noticed that shoemakers had stumbled into an interesting trick: By filling glass globes with water and placing them in front of candles, they created tiny spotlights in their shops.
When Perzy tried the trick with a lightbulb, he discovered the brightness wasn't improved. But what if he added something to the water that the light could bounce off of? Perzy started with white semolina flakes, used in baby food at the time. “He poured [them] into the glass globe, and [they] got soaked by the water and floated very slowly to the base of the globe,” his grandson, Erwin Perzy III, told the BBC. “This effect reminded him of snowfall.”
Inspiration struck: What if he used his technical expertise to create a tiny diorama in his snowy little world? Perzy made a miniature replica of the Basilica of the Birth of the Virgin Mary in Mariazell, Austria, placed it in his water-filled globe, sealed it, and mounted it to a gypsum base that he painted black. And voila—the first snow globe was born.
At least, that's the story Austrians like to peddle. But what about the snow globes that appeared a few decades before, in another country entirely?
PARISIAN BEGINNINGS
According to Nancy McMichael, a snow globe collector profiled in a 1997 article in the New York Times, the first snow globes were showcased at the 1878 Paris Universal Exposition by a local glassware firm. She isn't the only one who noticed. As described in the (exhaustive) report of the U.S. commissioners to the exposition, the water-filled globes each featured a little man holding an umbrella, and "a white powder which, when the paperweight is turned upside down, falls in an imitation of a snowstorm."
The next iteration of the snow globe came in 1889, again at the Paris Universal Exposition. As McMichael writes in her book Snowdomes, this time the globe—which was the work of an enterprising souvenir vendor—featured a tiny ceramic version of the just-unveiled Eiffel Tower, and the whole ball fit in the palm of a hand. (An example of the globe lives at the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of glass in Wisconsin.)
“The rest,” McMichael wrote, “is history.”
But it’s interesting history, one that reflects a larger story about how items were manufactured and sold, and what made them popular in the 20th century.
Though Perzy—who patented his globe in 1900—didn’t invent the snow globe, he and his brother are responsible for catapulting the souvenir into the position of tchotchke primacy it holds today. Seizing on the invention, the pair opened a shop, Original Wiener Schneekugel Manufaktur, in Vienna. Today, that shop is still run by an Erwin Perzy—his grandson, Erwin Perzy III—and they still make snow globes, containing Austrian tourist attractions, animals, and Christmas themes, in the same Vienna workshop where the original Perzy practiced his craft.
But it's easy to forget that Perzy was also an artisan. His items were painstakingly hand-crafted. So while his snow globes (also called “snow domes” or “snow weights”) were exquisite and popular, they were neither cheap nor widespread. For the snow globe to go global, it needed to be mass-produced—and that's how America got into the business.
A MASS-MARKET MEMENTO
In 1927, a Pittsburgh man named Joseph Garaja filed his application for a patent for a liquid-filled novelty paperweight that improved upon previous designs; the design he presented and later sold was a fish floating in seagrass. But it wasn't Garaja’s under-the-sea theme that impressed the industry. His real contribution to snow globe manufacturing was in pioneering the now-obvious method of assembling the globes underwater to ensure they were entirely filled. This, David Bear wrote for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2000, “revolutionized” the snow globe industry: “They went from being expensive mementos individually crafted by skilled artisans to items that could be cheaply mass-produced and sold.”
Which they were: In the 1930s, William Snyder, a New Jersey entrepreneur, began selling souvenir globes for $1, around $18 now. Snyder would later earn two patents related to snow globes and his company, Atlas Crystal Works, would become a major manufacturer of the items.
But the big boom for snow globes came, as it did for so many other things in the 20th century, after a little product placement. During the winter of 1940 Ginger Rogers vehicle Kitty Foyle, young Kitty launches a flashback scene when she shakes a snow globe containing the figure of a girl on a sled.