When the Continental Blockade collapsed, English goods flooded the European market and company profits fell. Rösler supplemented his product line by assembling pipes for tobacco smoking.
Blind alleys were generally the domain of obstinate inventors who built their own workshops but never quite succeeded in finding a market for their (often expensive) products.
The poor soil around Mikulášovice did not yield so easy a living as the fertile land of the Bohemian interior and what produce the rocky fields did bear hardly covered the needs of the families toiling there.
