Designer: Richard Rohac (1906 – 1956)

Item: Dinner Bell

Manufactured by: Richard Rohac

Country of origin: Austria

Year made: Ca. 1950

Materials: Patinated and polished brass

Dimensions: 4 ½” x 2 ¾”

Condition: Excellent

Description: An important design that we have seen attributed to both Karl Hagenauer, Carl Auböck, and Walter Bosse, but to date we have not been able to find any signed examples of this design by them. Auböck did design a dinner bell with a ribbed exterior, but his is a dome shape and uses a leather strap, plus his bells are much heavier. This example is marked on the interior of the bell with the Rohac cypher of reverse Rs and his arched “Made in Austria” as shown in the photos. We have only seen three other real Rohac signed versions of this bell. We have attached an image from the page in Rohac’s catalog showing this model and confirming that this design was his.

Beware that there are many knockoffs of this design of much poorer quality, both in materials and workmanship that have been circulating mostly out of Europe and show up regularly on various internet sites. It is hard to know whether these knockoffs, which are always unmarked, were made to deceive, but we were fooled once. For the four real ones we have seen we have probably seen thousands of fakes. We believe that someone used the original Rohac catalog which only shows the exterior of the bell to create these knockoffs, but once you handle a real one the others are so obviously fakes.