The first snow domes were displayed at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1878. Designed by seven French inventors, these “snow globes” were basically decorated glass paperweights filled with water and white powder. Snow globes with miniature Eiffel Towers encased inside were sold to the public eleven years later. Soon after, other countries including Germany and Italy started to produce their own versions of the water globe. And it wasn’t until the 1920s that the United States began to produce the little water worlds.
Today, most of the world’s snow globes are made in China and made primarily of plastic. Before World War II, however, the globes were mostly glass. The snow found inside has been produced from many different sources: bone chips, camphor and wax, ground rice, pottery flecks and porcelain. Currently, the snow is most often made from bits of white plastic or glitter. And the globe is filled with distilled water and laced with a bit of glycol to slow the movement of the flakes.
But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing for these plastic wonders. In the 1950’s, a manufacturer decided to add antifreeze to his globes so they wouldn’t freeze during shipping. The public did not look kindly upon this gesture, as antifreeze is potentially dangerous if ingested.
Then, in the 1960s, snow globes from Hong Kong were filled with polluted harbor water. And some U.S. children became sick after drinking the contents of broken domes. Not a positive spin for the almighty snow dome.
Despite some bad publicity, the snow dome has endured through the ages. And in some cases, it has risen to stardom. Just take a look at the 1937 Shirley Temple movie, Heidi, and you will witness the curly-haired child peering into a snow shaker of a miniature cabin. Or who could forget the scene from the 1939 classic, Citizen Kane, in which a dying Charles Foster Kane drops a snow globe with a replica of the sled known as Rosebud. And of course there is the final episode of St. Elsewhere in which a father places his young autistic son’s miniature St. Eligius snow globe on the living room television set, leaving us to believe that St. Elsewhere’s saga had been a figment of the young boy’s imagination.
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