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  • 2020-12-15 (xsd:date)
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  • Was the Snow Globe Invented by Accident? (en)
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  • In December 2020, with the holiday season just around the corner, an interesting tidbit about the ubiquitous snow globe ornament was circulated on social media: This is an honest anecdote about the invention of the snow globe. However, it's not the entire story. The above-displayed message refers to Erwin Perzy, an Austrian surgical instruments mechanic who accidentally created one of the first snow globes in 1900 while he was attempting to improve the brightness of a lightbulb, as the BBC reported in 2013: Perzy would eventually start selling these snow globes via his company, Original Vienna Snow Globes, which is still in operation today. Here's a video of Perzy's grandson, who currently runs the operation, talking about his grandfather's legacy: https://youtu.be/pm7YB749LOs While Perzy may have accidentally stumbled upon the idea for the snow globe, he wasn't the first to come up with the concept. In fact, records indicate that these ornamental displays were around at least two decades before Perzy's invention. A report from United States Commissioners detailing the exhibits at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1878 described one snow globe displayed there: While images of this 1878 snow globe do not appear to exist, we did find a photograph of another snow globe displayed at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition. The following photograph from the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass shows one of the first water globes, or snow globes that was introduced as a souvenir at the 1889 Exposition Universelle (world's fair) in Paris by the famous postcard editors Léon & Levy: According to the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass, this snow globe was made of ceramic and glass and stands about 3 inches tall. In the United States, the snow globe ball didn't start rolling until 1927 when Joseph Garaja of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, filed a patent for an ornamental paper weight. While Garaja's design did not feature a holiday display — rather, it showed fish floating in seaweed — the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote that Garaja's method of constructing the snow globe entirely underwater revolutionized the snowdome industry: Here's an image of Garaja's patent: (en)
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