Reballio Revisited: Two Lost Generations and a Forgotten Temperature Scale
Our history of the Rotterdam barometer makers Reballio has been substantially expanded.
The Reballio article has been rewritten from the ground up, and the family tree looks rather different than it did.
Between founder Anthony Christoffel Reballio (Milan, c. 1720–25 — Rotterdam, 1801) and Angelus of “A. Reballio & Zoon” there turn out to be two generations nobody had accounted for. The founder’s son Engel Anthony worked on his own in Schiedam, went bankrupt in 1788 and died before his father. His three sons — all “weerglazenmakers” — were born not in Holland but in Pognana on Lake Como, and two of them ran the firm “Gebr. A. en E. Reballio” on the Vissersdijk from about 1810. So the famous “third generation” label refers to the third sign over the door, not the third generation of the family.