YouTuber Ben "NightHawkInLight" Cusick recently dumped a bunch of chemicals into a bottle of vodka and saw some amazing things. No, not by the usual method of guzzling it down, but by showing off his latest homemade "storm glass"—a method of weather forecasting dating from the 18th century that entails looking for snowstorms and fog raging within the bottle. As his video shows, it's beautiful in a way a snow globe can never be. And, at least as far as scientific measurement is concerned, it doesn't really work.

The idea is that you can predict what kind of weather lies on the horizon by watching the sealed bottle, which is traditionally filled with a mixture of ammonium chloride, potassium nitrate, camphor, water, and alcohol that's normally clear when heated up. As the solution cools, white crystals form, and it was thought that subtle changes in the atmosphere would cause big changes in the shapes of the flakes forming within. In the video, for instance, the mixture quickly jumps from a hazy fog to dense "snow" where big flakes swirl about.

Storm glasses have been out of vogue for well over a century now, but one of their greatest champions was Robert FitzRoy, the pioneering meteorologist and captain of the the HMS Beagle that famously carted Charles Darwin around the world. In his 1863 Weather Book, FitzRoy claimed that small spots in what he called his "camphor glass" signaled future fog and that a cloudy jar with small stars meant thunderstorms were on the way.

Yet the real reason for the spectacular shows appears to be rather simple, as first conclusively revealed by Japanese researchers in a 2008 paper in the Journal of Crystal Growth.

"In reality, the crystal formation only changes as a result of temperature, so a storm glass' prediction abilities are suspect at best," Cusick says in the video.