Make the season bright with Reindeer Knoll - a joyful guide to Christmas traditions, history, activities, and songs. Discover the origins of beloved Christmas customs like decorating trees, Santa Claus, and gift-giving. Learn fun holiday activities like baking cookies, building snowmen, and Christmas crafts. Sing along to classic Christmas carols and songs the whole family will love.
The snow globe dates back to at least 1878, as seen in the Paris Exposition Universelle (1878) and reported in the US commissioner's report of the expo: "Paper weights of hollow balls filled with water, containing a man with an umbrella. These balls also contain a white powder which, when the paper weight is turned upside down, falls in imitation of a snow storm." Around 1900 when Erwin Perzy, a surgical instrument maker in Vienna, Austria, received a request from a doctor for a lightbulb that produced the bright illumination needed for surgery.
At first, Perzy thought he could solve the problem with a shoemakers’ lamp, a glass globe filled with water that, when placed in front of the lightbulb, amplified and focused the light on the work area. While helpful, the light was too focused on one small spot and thus, not practical for surgery. He continued to experiment with ways to both amplify and spread the light by inserting metal flakes into the globe, but they quickly sank to the bottom. Perzy thought they looked a bit like falling snow. Inspired by that image, he tried filling the globe with semolina and, when he shook the globe, he saw the beauty of winter in Vienna.
Erwin Perzy went on to perfect his design. For many years, snow globes were completely handmade. For a while, snow globes were almost completely exclusive to Erwin’s home country, Austria. Soon, they spread all over the world. After Erwin Perzy’s invention, the first World War happened. Following the war, American citizens began to visit Austria, where they took home snow globes as a souvenir. American inventors soon caught on to the idea and began to make their own creations.