By Swati Pandey
Before airport shops began selling miniature versions of every site in the world — extraordinary or otherwise — encased in plastic and sprinkled with glittering dust, snowglobes were the singular souvenir of a singular event, the 1889 Paris World’s Fair.
The World’s Fair dome was not the first object to put something precious under glass. Treasured family objects — figurines, clocks, medals, heirlooms — had long sat on shelves in display cases. Ivory, wood and bone dioramas had been preserved under glass across Europe for decades. France had manufactured glass paperweights — that least useful of supposedly useful objects — for nearly a century. Even in America, little domes appeared in the 1870s (these now sit in a museum in Neenah, Wis.). Glass, though it was easy enough to make by the late 19th century, still carried a veneer of luxury. To put something under glass indicated an object’s worth.
The fair had its share of wonders, but many patrons were particularly taken with the exhibits of decorated glass, particularly the paperweights of hollow balls filled with water and white specks in an imitation of a snowstorm.
Among the fair’s globes was one made by an aspiring merchant: In his version, as on the fairgrounds themselves, the new Eiffel Tower darkly pierced a pale sky. The domed version, of course, could sit in an outstretched palm, fit to carry home. The souvenir’s success came less from its beauty than from its tie to a moment of global significance: the building of the tower, the 100th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the dawn of a new century. Unlike family heirlooms or ivory dioramas, the snowglobe wasn’t intrinsically valuable — it only announced itself as such, and so it was.
After the Paris fair, snowglobes proliferated across Europe and America, with several inventors claiming the object as their own. Around the turn of the century, Erwin Perzy, a Viennese medical instrument maker, was trying to make a brighter operating room bulb by filling a globe with water and white grit and shining light through it. It didn’t work, except to remind Perzy of snow. At the request of a souvenir-maker friend, he put the Basilica of the Birth of the Virgin Mary below a glass globe, which, when shaken, resembled a snowstorm. Perzy patented the “Glass Globe with Snow Effect” in 1900, launched a business and, by 1908, won an award from the Austrian emperor, Franz Josef I. His company still churns out domes today.
By the 1920s, German firms were exporting snowglobes to the U.S. and Canada. In 1927, a Pittsburgh man, Joseph Garaja, filed a patent for a snowglobe of “artistic attractiveness and novel ornamentation.” A popular mail-order catalog advertised the item in 1929; within a year, Japanese firms copied Garaja’s design, taking the globes fully, er, global.
After that, snowglobes were everywhere. They were called snowshakers, waterdomes, snowstorms, water balls and blizzard-weights. They were round or square or oval, tall or short, and sat on bases of wood, stone, metal, marble, ceramic or glazed pottery. Inside were figurines of wood, stone or wax, and snow made of china pieces, minerals, sand, sawdust, ground rice, even chips of animal bone. Manufacturers ferociously guarded their recipes for snow, later adding chemicals to keep the water from freezing and to make the snow float rather than just fall.
In the middle of the 20th century, mass production helped the snowglobe industry thrive even more. Plastic came to be a cheap substitute for every material used to make the domes — the sphere, the base, the figures and the snow itself. The shape of the snowglobe evolved until an oval atop a slim base became the norm. Their purpose was no longer to be cherished but to simply sit, with several others, in dusty cabinets like family heirlooms once did, the snowglobes’ less-important contents twice encased.
Snowglobe subjects varied away from cold weather and religion and seriousness to include everything imaginable. There were sexy red-tinted James Dean snowglobes dusted with silver confetti, elephant-dotted Barry Goldwater campaign domes and racially offensive Sambo spheres. Snowglobes started to play music or double as ashtrays. Lawsuits and embargos targeted globes filled with poisonous, flammable chemicals, but their production didn’t wane.
Though high-end snowglobes still exist — President Obama ordered one from Perzy’s still-kicking Viennese company for his daughter Sasha — the lesser variety have saturated most every tourist shop in the world. They remain the most souvenir-ish of souvenirs. Unlike a postcard or a shot glass or a commemorative spoon, the snowdome’s placement of a scene below glass makes literal the word souvenir, French for “memory,” a word derived from a Latin verb meaning, roughly, “to come from beneath” — as memories so often seem to.
Perhaps it was Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” that cemented the snowdome as a carrier of memory. In the 1941 film’s opening scene, the title character breaks a globe on his deathbed, its contents recalling — and carrying the viewers to — his woodsy, snowy childhood home. No matter how crass or common the globes became by the end of the 20th century, they still evoked, as they did for Kane, a dreamy and idyllic nostalgia.
In this way, the snowglobe finally became art, or at least serviced other art. In Adrian Lyne’s “Unfaithful,” the mild husband, played by Richard Gere, keeps a snowglobe collection, from which his wife filches one to give to her lover. Gere’s character keeps it together until he sees the dome — and, as if encased within it, his formerly happy marriage — on the other man’s shelf. (The “Citizen Kane” snowglobe suffered relatively less.)
Artists Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz, reeling from their move from New York City to the Second Amendment-happy Appalachian foothills, put under glass disturbing subversions of classic snowglobe scenes: a man hanging himself in an otherwise lovely forest, another dangling a cute-as-a-button toddler down a well.
And perhaps most famously, long before there was “Lost,” the makers of “St. Elsewhere” pulled the greatest of series finale stunts. They implied that their entire show was the dream of an autistic boy staring at a snowdome — at last giving the humble globe and its little diorama the vastness of a real and full world.
Before airport shops began selling miniature versions of every site in the world — extraordinary or otherwise — encased in plastic and sprinkled with glittering dust, snowglobes were the singular souvenir of a singular event, the 1889 Paris World’s Fair.
The World’s Fair dome was not the first object to put something precious under glass. Treasured family objects — figurines, clocks, medals, heirlooms — had long sat on shelves in display cases. Ivory, wood and bone dioramas had been preserved under glass across Europe for decades. France had manufactured glass paperweights — that least useful of supposedly useful objects — for nearly a century. Even in America, little domes appeared in the 1870s (these now sit in a museum in Neenah, Wis.). Glass, though it was easy enough to make by the late 19th century, still carried a veneer of luxury. To put something under glass indicated an object’s worth.
The fair had its share of wonders, but many patrons were particularly taken with the exhibits of decorated glass, particularly the paperweights of hollow balls filled with water and white specks in an imitation of a snowstorm.
Among the fair’s globes was one made by an aspiring merchant: In his version, as on the fairgrounds themselves, the new Eiffel Tower darkly pierced a pale sky. The domed version, of course, could sit in an outstretched palm, fit to carry home. The souvenir’s success came less from its beauty than from its tie to a moment of global significance: the building of the tower, the 100th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the dawn of a new century. Unlike family heirlooms or ivory dioramas, the snowglobe wasn’t intrinsically valuable — it only announced itself as such, and so it was.
After the Paris fair, snowglobes proliferated across Europe and America, with several inventors claiming the object as their own. Around the turn of the century, Erwin Perzy, a Viennese medical instrument maker, was trying to make a brighter operating room bulb by filling a globe with water and white grit and shining light through it. It didn’t work, except to remind Perzy of snow. At the request of a souvenir-maker friend, he put the Basilica of the Birth of the Virgin Mary below a glass globe, which, when shaken, resembled a snowstorm. Perzy patented the “Glass Globe with Snow Effect” in 1900, launched a business and, by 1908, won an award from the Austrian emperor, Franz Josef I. His company still churns out domes today.
By the 1920s, German firms were exporting snowglobes to the U.S. and Canada. In 1927, a Pittsburgh man, Joseph Garaja, filed a patent for a snowglobe of “artistic attractiveness and novel ornamentation.” A popular mail-order catalog advertised the item in 1929; within a year, Japanese firms copied Garaja’s design, taking the globes fully, er, global.
After that, snowglobes were everywhere. They were called snowshakers, waterdomes, snowstorms, water balls and blizzard-weights. They were round or square or oval, tall or short, and sat on bases of wood, stone, metal, marble, ceramic or glazed pottery. Inside were figurines of wood, stone or wax, and snow made of china pieces, minerals, sand, sawdust, ground rice, even chips of animal bone. Manufacturers ferociously guarded their recipes for snow, later adding chemicals to keep the water from freezing and to make the snow float rather than just fall.
In the middle of the 20th century, mass production helped the snowglobe industry thrive even more. Plastic came to be a cheap substitute for every material used to make the domes — the sphere, the base, the figures and the snow itself. The shape of the snowglobe evolved until an oval atop a slim base became the norm. Their purpose was no longer to be cherished but to simply sit, with several others, in dusty cabinets like family heirlooms once did, the snowglobes’ less-important contents twice encased.
Snowglobe subjects varied away from cold weather and religion and seriousness to include everything imaginable. There were sexy red-tinted James Dean snowglobes dusted with silver confetti, elephant-dotted Barry Goldwater campaign domes and racially offensive Sambo spheres. Snowglobes started to play music or double as ashtrays. Lawsuits and embargos targeted globes filled with poisonous, flammable chemicals, but their production didn’t wane.
Though high-end snowglobes still exist — President Obama ordered one from Perzy’s still-kicking Viennese company for his daughter Sasha — the lesser variety have saturated most every tourist shop in the world. They remain the most souvenir-ish of souvenirs. Unlike a postcard or a shot glass or a commemorative spoon, the snowdome’s placement of a scene below glass makes literal the word souvenir, French for “memory,” a word derived from a Latin verb meaning, roughly, “to come from beneath” — as memories so often seem to.
Perhaps it was Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” that cemented the snowdome as a carrier of memory. In the 1941 film’s opening scene, the title character breaks a globe on his deathbed, its contents recalling — and carrying the viewers to — his woodsy, snowy childhood home. No matter how crass or common the globes became by the end of the 20th century, they still evoked, as they did for Kane, a dreamy and idyllic nostalgia.
In this way, the snowglobe finally became art, or at least serviced other art. In Adrian Lyne’s “Unfaithful,” the mild husband, played by Richard Gere, keeps a snowglobe collection, from which his wife filches one to give to her lover. Gere’s character keeps it together until he sees the dome — and, as if encased within it, his formerly happy marriage — on the other man’s shelf. (The “Citizen Kane” snowglobe suffered relatively less.)
Artists Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz, reeling from their move from New York City to the Second Amendment-happy Appalachian foothills, put under glass disturbing subversions of classic snowglobe scenes: a man hanging himself in an otherwise lovely forest, another dangling a cute-as-a-button toddler down a well.
And perhaps most famously, long before there was “Lost,” the makers of “St. Elsewhere” pulled the greatest of series finale stunts. They implied that their entire show was the dream of an autistic boy staring at a snowdome — at last giving the humble globe and its little diorama the vastness of a real and full world.


