You place the dome in your hand, turn it over and beautifully, magically the item inside is engulfed in a swirling slow-motion blizzard. Everyone can relate to them – evoking a childhood memory or nostalgia of a simpler time. The first mention of a snow globe featured a man with an umbrella displayed at the Paris Exposition of 1878. It was later suggested that the globes were created to commemorate the Tower’s inauguration.

A few years later, a Viennese man Edwin Perzy developed the same idea when researching a way to improve operating room light..He used a glass globe filled with water, hoping to create a magnifying lens by increasing refraction. To enhance the reflected light, Perzy put ground glass in the water. When it quickly sank, he tried semolina which floated slowly to the bottom of the globe. It did nothing to improve the light quality, but the snowfall inspired him to make his first snow globe: he carved a small house and inserted it into the globe.

Mass production began in the US during the 1920s. Joseph Garaja of Pittsburgh was granted a patent in 1927, which altered how snow globes were made. His method needed the spheres to be assembled underwater, removing any trapped air. This ingenious method made it possible for the industry to go into mass production, which drastically lowered the prices of globes.

However, by the early 1960s, glass snow globes had been overtaken by plastic Hong Kong-made globes. It was soon discovered that the water in their spheres was filthy, obtained directly from their port. As a result, a Hong Kong snow globe producer got into significant trouble and was temporarily barred from entering the United States.

The “snow” in snow globes has a fascinating backstory as well. Snow was previously created in glass domes using tiny porcelain, bone chips, or ground rice. Camphor/wax, as well as meerschaum, was also used to make these snowflakes. Today, most “snow” is tiny particles or shards of white plastic. Also, the liquid hasn’t always been water; at one point, light oil was used. In addition, glycol (antifreeze) was added to help with the problem of freezing during winter shipping.

The snow globe fell out of favor in the 1970’s when it epitomized kitsch –but have evolved into something more sophisticated, intricate and valued among designers and collectors. Novelty gift manufacturers have upgraded the designs and components making them unique gift items often including beautifully modelled landscapes.

Some incorporate lights, music and motors eliminating the need for shaking. Many high-end department stores introduce a custom design every year to commemorate the Christmas season.

Snow globes have become an increasingly popular collectible for both antique and novelty globes. Actor, Corbin Bernsen may be the most prolific collector with about 8,000 – he began collecting snow globes in the ‘80’s. “There’s something that happens to a collector, this internal voice that says, ‘I want to have one of each that is in existence,’” Bernsen says.

Originally the globes were made of glass and the figures inside were made of porcelain, bone, metals, minerals, rubber or wax. The snow or “flitter” as it’s called, could have been ground rice, wax, soap, sand, bone fragments, meerschaum, metal flakes or sawdust. Producers tried everything. The base was either round or square and may have been of stone, marble, ceramic or wood. Some are quite bizarre!!!

“Snow domes are not only fascinating to look at, to hold, to play with, they are folk art,” says collector Nancy McMichael, author of Snowdomes (Abbeville Press). “They are a bridge back to an idealized past we think existed but is actually in our head. It is something we carry with us.”

When playing cards first arrived in Europe toward the end of the 14th century AD, they caused quite a furor. In 1377, the town council of Florence complained that the playing of “a certain game called naibbe has recently been introduced into these parts,” and by a vote of 98 to 25 decided to prohibit it. In the same year cards reached Paris, where new city regulations cracked down on working-class cardplayers but apparently left nobel devotees alone.

European Playing Cards

The following year, in the Bavarian city of Regensburg, the council tried to limit card games to small stakes. By 1387, cards had arrived in the Spanish kingdom of Castile, where the government tried to ban them.

The killjoys were fighting a losting battle, however, for even at this early stage, cards began to acquire royal patrons. In 1379, the prince of Brabant, in Belgium, bought a highly decorated pack of cards, while in 1392 the mad French king Charles VI received three packs of cards painted by artist Jacquemin Gringonneur “for his amusement during the intervals in his sad illness.”

Charles VI/Gringonneur Cards

Playing cards soon led to the emergence of cardsharps, and the mother of all card swindles is recorded in the Parisian court annals for 1408. Two dubious characters lured a traveling merchant into an inn with talk of a good currency deal. One of them then produced a pack of cards from his pocket and demonstrated an amusing game of guessing the identity of a card while seeing only its back. The astute merchant soon noticed that one of the cards had a slight but distinctive mark on the reverse, so he happily joined in when the betting started. When the marked card turned up, the trader put his shirt on it, only to find that the front of the card was not the same, as it had been switched for another.

The French also made one great contribution to the development of playing cards by inventing, around 1480 AD, the names and shapes of the four suits (spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs) we still use today. These simple geometric shapes did much to encourage card playing. By the end of the 15th century, playing card manufacture was a major industry, and even Johannes Gutenberg, often claimed to be the inventor of movable type, became involved.

Johannes Gutenberg Card

He developed some of the mechanical methods of production and, at a time when his finances were in desperate straits, he used drawings that his artists had prepared for his famous Bible to decorate the back of a deck of playing cards.

From this point the history of Western playing cards is clear. But who brought them to Europe in the first place? The subject is swathed in mystery, and it has at different times been claimed that they were introduced by Marco Polo (1254-1324), the Crusaders, or the Gypsies. The most exotic theories credit the Gypsies with the invention of cards (as a means of divination), and it has therefore been argued that their origins lie in India or even Egypt. The truth is that playing cards are a Chinese invention, but the problem has been that little is known of their transmission from China to the West.

Ancient Chinese Playing Cards

Playing cards had been invented in China by at least the 9th century AD when, according to tradition, a princess and her relatives played the “leaf game,” or cards. Women were certainly important in the development of card games, for one apparently wrote the world’s first book on the subject (now lost), later in that century.

By the 11th century, cards were printed with woodcut blocks, and in the early Ming dynasty (1369-1644 AD) famous artists were employed to design card backs with portraits of characters from favorite novels, such as The Water Margin. Chinese cards were much smaller than ours (about 2 inches long and 1 inch wide) and were printed on fairly thick paper, which made them hard-wearing but difficult to shuffle. Chinese “money cards” had four suits: cash, strings (of cash), myriads (of strings) and tens (of myriads), with the numbers 2 thru 9 in the first three and 1 thru 9 in the fourth.

Ancient Woodcut Playing Cards

The Chinese of yesteryear were enthusiastic cardplayers and gamblers, as they are today. Ming Dynasty books on cards praised them as superior to all other amusements, for they “were convenient to carry, could stimulate thinking and could be played by a group of four without annoying conversation, and without the difficulties which accompanied playing chess or meditation.” Also, “cards could be played in almost any circumstances without restrictions of time, place, weather, or qualification of partners.”

But this still leaves us without a link to Europe, for early Western cards don’t resemble Chinese ones and have different suits. The missing link appears to be the Islamic world, despite the fact that card playing was frowned on by Muslim clerics.

In 1938, Professor L.A. Mayer came across a pack of 52 cards while searching through the collections of the famous Topkapi Museum, in Istanbul, Turkey. They had been made in Egypt about 1400 AD, using designs that closely resemble those of early Italian cards.

Second card from left: The Seven of Swords (equivalent to Seven of Clubs)

Third card from left: the Malik of Cups (equivalent to the King of Hearts)

The Arabic inscriptions on the court cards make clear the origin of the word naibbe for cards (used by the Florence council); they are called the Malik (King), Na’ib Malik (Governor), and Na’ib Thani (Deputy Governor). They are in 4 suits – swords, polo sticks, cups, and coins (equivalent to modern clubs, spades, hearts and diamonds).

The only significant difference between these and early Italian cards is that the Egyptian ones are, like the Chinese, long and thin. Even this difficulty seems to have been overcome by the find of a single card with an Arabic inscription made around 1200 AD; its dimensions are like those of Italian cards, which are still slightly narrower than those made today in the rest of Europe.

There can now be little doubt that the Arabs were the intermediaries for the widespread transmission of one of ancient China’s most popular inventions.

Source: Ancient Inventions