Learn the Interesting History of the Man Who Invented Snow Globes

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Although most people have at least one snow globe, believe it or not, like most things in life, they haven’t been around forever. I have a few, and while most are stored in the attic with my Christmas ornaments, I have one right here in my office. My son bought it for me when he visited Italy a few years ago. Snow globes are so ubiquitous that we haven’t put a lot of thought into their history, but the fact is that there was no such thing as a snow globe before 1900 when they were invented by accident by a man from Vienna, Austria named Erwin Perzy I.

Perzy wasn’t an inventor by trade. In fact, he specialized in repairing and designing medical tools for doctors. It was these doctors who came to Perzy with a dilemma. Even though they had the newly introduced electric lightbulbs, they still didn’t have enough light in their operating rooms. They wanted to know if Perzy could think of a solution to their problem. As Perzy puzzled over the problem, he remembered that he had seen shoemakers using glass balls filled with water to magnify candlelight. When Perzy tried this, it didn’t give much more light than the doctors already had.

It was then that he came upon an idea that changed his family forever. He wondered what would happen if he added something to the water that reflects light, so he tried metal flakes. They were too heavy and sank quickly to the bottoms of the glass balls. Then he remembered semolina flakes, which were used in baby food at the time. They were much lighter and they worked. Seeing the flakes in the glass globes, Perzy was reminded of falling snow, so he put a tiny pewter church in a ball and sent it with a friend to a shop, where it sold very quickly.

Today, Perzy’s grandson, Erwin Perzy III, runs the shop with his daughter, who will someday take over the family business.

Watch the video below for more about this fascinating story.

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