His assistance included providing loans at 6% interest rate to businesses in need of capital, and even helping them find export markets financially.

It was his financial support in 1861, for example, which allowed the company Gebrüder Feix in Albrechtsdorf to get started, which went on to become one of the largest manufacturers of buttons, black fashion jewellery and crystal wares in the land.

The owners of these companies regularly informed the Riedels about current demand, competition, and big orders that exporters then forwarded to their suppliers for production.

Begler invented a number of coloured glass types including jet black, lily yellow, antimony ruby, marble-like variations, and the Venetian aventurine.

On 6 March 1849, Josef Riedel bought a new glassworks, with his own money, from Ignaz Friedrich, a textile entrepreneur and glass trader.

After five years, Josef Riedel wanted to update the newly acquired glassworks in Polaun to meet expectations of modern jewellery component production facilities.

For seven years Josef Riedel had been travelling from Antoniwald to Polaun at least three times a week to oversee the rebuilding and later to run the glassworks.

At the beginning of the century the Iser Mountains had also become an important hub for the Bohemian textile industry with the mills ranking among the largest in the Empire.

Josef wanted to be involved in textiles: in 1858, he began to build a modern cotton mill on the main Giant Mountain road at Grünthal on the Iser River.

These were purchased in the 1860s and 70s by the large Gablonz trading companies: Josef Pfeiffer, Eduard Dressler and Wilhelm Klaar, as well as smaller businesses in the Iser Mountains.

Josef built a branch line from the nearby station in Tannwald in order to easily transport the coal from Hostomitz to his works in Polaun.

In 1873 the Riedels participated in the World Exhibition in Vienna, where they won a gold medal for their wares, including the all-new hollow decorative glass.

The new hollow glass was sold through Riedel's own distributors abroad, directly to foreign partners in Germany, Great Britain and France and to domestic merchants from Böhmisch Leipa region and Vienna.

The design of the building had a distinctly English allure, no doubt due to the six months the young businessman spent in Britain as a volunteer apprentice in the late 1860s.

Wilhelm Riedel invented and patented the technology of “using compressed air to shape hollow glass in metal moulds”.

On 13 December 1879 the Polaun company bought the Neudorf glassworks near Gablonz, expanded and adapted its furnace to use coal gas rather than a wood-burning kiln.

For this project the Riedel family decided to fully utilise the railroad tracks they had built five years previously to transport the coal required to heat the glass furnaces.

Josef Jr. gained his technical chemical education at the Mochmann Institute in Dresden and l'École Municipale de Chimie Industrielle in Mühlhausen where he studied for four terms in 1881–82, he was perfectly prepared for the new role he was about to embrace.

The interest and demand for metal-cast and metal-encased glass grew with products sold globally due to the trading relations of the Riedel's customers.

When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, the Riedels implemented a private phone line in the forests to improve communication amongst their factories in 1883.

In 1870, Josef Schmiedel's Hundorf glassworks began making glass for beads - they were fierce competitors for Riedel offering them to the market for less.

The Klein Iser glassworks, built by Franz Riedel in 1828, was closed in 1884 as it was the last non-industrial glass manufacturer whose operation had become prohibitively expensive.

However, in the same year, Venetian glassmakers developed a special machine to machine-cut and polish seed beads into perfect tiny donuts.

The decorated glass produced in this workshop with colourful enamels became extremely popular in Venice, the French market as well as overseas in South America.

The company was greatly honoured in 1888, when it was invited to be one of only seven glass factories in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to participate in the Exhibition of the Emperor's 40th Jubilee in Vienna.

At the exhibition, the Viennese specialist journal Centrallblatt focused on Joseph Riedel's coloured glass, which often appeared with decorative metal details.

The first glass lampshades to come out of the Riedel factories were shaped like bowls and flowers, and they instantly became an important part of the company's repertory.

In 1894, the group of companies represented half of the state's entire revenue from the Polaun region and employed 1,250 people (350 in the glassworks, 900 in the textile plants).

Josef Riedel was named Glass King of the Iser Mountains and in 1888, he was decorated with the papal Order of Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice.

[8] In 2004, Gourmet magazine reported that "Studies at major research centers in Europe and the U.S. suggest that Riedel’s claims are, scientifically, nonsense."