Snow Globes Weren’t Originally Designed To Be Decorations For Christmas
Have you ever wondered who came up with the idea of trapping a scenic winter wonderland inside a small glass ball?
Snow globes are symbols of holiday cheer and childhood nostalgia. It wouldn’t be Christmas without them! However, they weren’t originally designed to be decorations for the Christmas season.
It turns out that snow globes were accidentally invented. The inventor of the snow globe was Erwin Perzy I. He was a tradesman who built and repaired surgical instruments for physicians in Vienna. In 1900, he was tasked with finding an affordable way to improve the lighting in hospital operating rooms.
After tinkering around his workshop, Perzy became inspired by a tool that local shoemakers often used: a glass globe filled with water to act as a magnifying glass.
He placed an Edison light bulb next to a water-filled glass globe and tried to make the light brighter by adding different reflective materials to the liquid, including white wax particles that floated around before sinking to the bottom.
Perzy also crafted trinkets for a friend who sold souvenirs to pilgrims at the Mariazell Basilica, a religious site south of Vienna. He made little pewter models of the church to be sold alongside crosses and candles.
One day, he thought of putting the miniature church inside the glass globe filled with water and white wax particles.
And that’s how he created the first snow globe. He applied for a patent for “glass ball with snow effect” and formed a company with his brother Josef by the end of that year. They opened up a small workshop in the back of his house.
Perzy’s original model was very popular, so he started putting other models into glass spheres and sold them throughout Vienna.
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By 1908, he was well-known to many Austrians, including Emperor Franz Joseph, who presented him with an award as a skilled Austrian toymaker.
Perzy’s snow globe spread across Europe and even reached India by the 1920s. But after World War I, its popularity began to fade.
Snow globes were not seen as a necessary purchase during a time when families were going through economic hardship. Sales were still low during World War II.
When the war ended and soldiers went home to start families, creating the baby boom of the late 1940s and ’50s, snow globes became incredibly trendy.
Perzy’s son, Erwin Perzy II, worked with his father and eventually took over the family business. Perzy II created three new models of Christmas-themed snow globes: a snowman, Santa Claus, and a Christmas tree. In 1955, he took them to the international toy fair in Nuremberg, Germany. All the big chain stores wanted them.
That same year, Perzy II moved operations to an old carriage house down the street for more space. The U.S. was the Perzys’ biggest market, with roughly 10,000 shops selling their snow globes.
Perzy III continued running the business. He helped the company become global in the 1970s by making the family product popular in Japan.
Perzy snow globes are still being crafted in the old carriage house, where about 300,000 snow globes are produced each year.
The company is still thriving more than a century later. With new molds now being created with a computer and 3D printer, the future of snow globes is looking brighter than ever.
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