Every winter, the Windows of many department stores are decorated with a wide variety of decorations and souvenirs, including a variety of shapes of the "snow globe". Each crystal-clear glass sphere is a miniature winter themed landscape with various dreamlike elements, such as gingerbread houses, Christmas trees, sledges and angels, which gently shake and fall. For people, it represents a kind of nostalgia for winter life.
At the end of the 19th century, in a suburb of Vienna, Erwin Pelch, a technician who made medical instruments, was asked by a local surgeon to improve the brightness of the light bulbs in order to make the operating room brighter. He placed a glass ball filled with water in front of a lit candle to focus and amplify the light, and put shredded paper inside the ball to reflect the light. He later replaced it with semolina, but the experiment did not work as expected. custom snow globe lantern is available here.
However, Pelch noticed that the wet white powder was like snowflakes when it fell to the bottom of the glass sphere, and he immediately patented it and opened a factory to make "snow globes." The snow globe market quickly swept Austria.
Initially, assembling and coloring the snow globes were manual tasks that took too long and cost too much to mass produce. It was not until the mid-20th century that the invention of underwater assembly technology, the rise of mass tourism and the use of cheap plastics as raw materials enabled the industrial production of snow balls around the world, making them an affordable commodity for ordinary people. But today, Pelch snow globes are still made by hand, with about 200,000 produced each year.
Today's snow globes come in hundreds of styles, including landmarks such as Vienna's City Hall, St. Stefan's Cathedral, a giant Ferris wheel and seasonal themes such as Christmas trees, Santa Claus and snowmen. Some snow globes also have built-in music boxes that play beautiful music.
Pelch Snow globes can also be made on request, and its fans include famous people from around the world, such as former presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who have customized snow globes based on California farms and red jeeps, inauguration confetti and their young daughters.
Today, the factory, museum and shop called "Authentic Vienna Snow Globe", located at 87 Schumann Street in Vienna, remains innovative and vibrant. In the early days of the epidemic, inspired by the phenomenon of people buying and hoarding toilet paper, the company launched mini snow balls with "toilet paper" embedded in them. When the physical stores were closed, the company successfully expanded its popularity and popularity through online shopping.