Josef Rodenstock

Josef Rodenstock was born in Ershausen, in the Prussian Province of Saxony. The eldest son of the "wool comber, master mechanic and merchant" Georg Rodenstock (1819-1894), he was 14 years old when he started selling haberdashery, without trader's or travel's licence, to support his family. He learned soon how to refill damaged tubes of mercury barometers, which he bought from another haberdasher and sold "with some advantage" on his sale trips. He even learned how to make new barometers by himself. So, the family began mass production in the early 1861. They had made the glass tubes in the Thuringian Forest and the dials - printed with the family name Rodenstock - in Würzburg.