Erwin Perzy built and repaired surgical instruments for local physicians in Vienna, Austria. In 1900, one of his clients requested a brighter light for his operating room. Just 23 years earlier in 1879, Thomas Edison filed a patent for his carbon-filament lamp and thus began the electric light age. Edison’s electric light was practical for most homes and businesses, but in 1900, light bulbs produced a warm, yellowish glow with the maximum brightness comparable to a modern 25-watt light bulb. The dim bulbs also produced a lot of heat which meant that the assistants had to keep the bulbs a certain distance away from surgeons and their patients. Surgeons squinted their eyes, wiped sweat from their brows, and snapped instructions to their assistants on the positioning of the dim bulbs. If you have ever held a flashlight while your father worked on a car, you know the frustration that those surgeons and their assistants endured. They needed a brighter light.
Erwin began searching for ways to increase the light produced by the light bulbs while making them cooler at the same time. Rather than looking for a brand new method, he looked to history for the answer. For hundreds of years, shoemakers and other craftsmen used schusterkugels (cobbler-spheres), glass spheres with a tubular end filled with water, to magnify and redirect candlelight into a concentrated beam. They were primitive spotlights. Erwin experimented with schusterkugels, but the light was still not bright enough. He added various substances to the water to reflect and intensify the light such as flakes of metal and fine glass particles, but they quickly sank to the bottom. Erwin was able to intensify the light but only for about a second. He tried just about everything he had in his workshop, but the substances either sank too quickly or failed to sink at all. Erwin turned to his kitchen and tried a multitude of edible items, including rice and flakes of a coarse flour called semolina flakes, but none enabled him to produce a brighter light for more than a second or two.
Erwin ultimately failed to create the brighter light that the surgeon had requested, but with his failure came an accidental invention for which he received the first patent. Erwin’s invention became popular worldwide. He built a company to produce his invention which is still owned and operated by the fourth generation of the Perzy family. You see, Erwin was drawn to the effect the semolina flakes produced when added to water. With the addition of a pewter miniature of Vienna’s Mariazell church at the base of the sphere, he had created what people in German speaking countries call “schneekugels.” You and I know Erwin Perzy’s invention as a snow globe.
Sources:
1. “Thomas Edison Biography,” National Park Service, NPS.gov, accessed December 7, 2025, https://www.nps.gov/edis/
2. “Die Original Wiener Schneekugel,” Original Wiener Schneekugelmanufaktur, accessed December 7, 2025, https://schneekugel.at/
3. Erik Trinidad, “How an Experiment to Amplify Light in Hospital Operating Rooms Led to the Accidental Invention of the Snow Globe,” Smithsonian magazine, December 27, 2024, https://www.smithsonianmag.
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