Snow globe
transparent sphere enclosing a miniaturized scene, filled with water with unattached objects resembling snowflakes
A snow globe (also called a waterglobe, snowstorm, or snowdome) is a transparent sphere or spheroid, traditionally made of glass, enclosing a miniaturized scene of some sort, often together with a model of a town, neighborhood, landscape or figure. The sphere also encloses the water in the globe; the water serves as the medium through which the "snow" falls. To activate the snow, the globe is shaken to churn up the white particles. The globe is then placed back in its position and the flakes fall down slowly through the water. Snow globes sometimes have a built-in music box that plays a song. Some snow globes have a design around the outer base for decoration. Snow globes are often used as a collectible item.
History
The snow globe dates back to at least 1878, as seen in the Paris Exposition Universelle 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."
At the end of the 19th century the Austrian Erwin Perzy, a producer of surgical instruments, popularised the so-called Schneekugel (snow globe) and got the first patent for it. Originally his goal was to develop an extra bright lightsource for use as a surgical lamp.
“Snow globe” enters the record as transparent sphere enclosing a miniaturized scene, filled with water with unattached objects resembling snowflakes. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Snow, globe and transparent can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q262046. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1878.
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This entry incorporates text from “Snow globe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.