There is a quote that says, “To appreciate the beauty of a snowflake, it is necessary to stand out in the cold.” These days, you might get away with appreciating it in the palm of your hand in the warmth of your home, thanks to an inadvertent invention from more than 100 years ago. Not many people know that the inventor of the snow globe was actually a designer of surgical instruments. Erwin Perzy, a Viennese man credited with designing and patenting the first snow globe as we know it, was looking for a way to improve the lamp used for medical surgery, originally called the Schusterkugel (or shoemaker’s lamp in German), which various craftsmen had been using to enhance the lighting for their work. In 1900, he found that putting glass shavings as glitter inside a water-filled glass globe to boost the light didn’t work because they fell too …