Bessler’s Wheel - Two Solutions?

Recently I suggested that Johann Bessler might have invented two solutions to his perpetual motion machine. I considered this possibility because of the history of the Landgrave’s offer of patronage to help Bessler try to sell his machine.  Bessler had been invited to show his machine to Karl the Landgrave of Hesse, but the distance now, between Draschwitz and Kassel is over 130 miles now and journeys could take weeks for distances covered in hours today. Travellers relied on personal carriages, walking, or local wagons.  Stagecoaches had begun to connect a few major towns, although service was infrequent and slow due to poor road conditions.

There is no mention of a carriage being sent to fetch him, and there would be no chance of Bessler showing the Landgrave his latest machine in his own home.  It must, therefore, have been a small model of his perpetual motion machine, small enough to fit in a case on the stage coach or on horseback.  Or possibly, the model he showed Karl could have been a disassembled version but whatever the truth, it had to be portable and still convincing enough for Karl to give it his seal of approval.

If Karl formed his initial opinion of Bessler’s wheel, from his examination of a small version of the PM machine, then its apparent simplicity might have been misleading.  I always wondered if the inventor, having found the solution, subsequently improved it to make it more powerful. He did improve the design of the Merseburg wheel making it able to rotate in either direction and I expect that each version incorporated improvements

Karl was reported as expressing surprise that no one had discovered the solution before and Bessler himself, commented that when the secret is revealed, he is afraid that people will complain that the idea is so simple it is not worth the asking price.

This leads me to the conclusion that I, at least, am probably overthinking the problem.  I’m trying too hard to use every clue he left us.  Maybe they refer to his larger more complex models? All we really need is working model achieved with a simple concept, possibly eliminating scissor mechanisms, ropes and pulleys.  Some may now suspect I’m underthinking the problem!

So I do have an idea that might work, but I’ll share it once I’ve tested it.  

JC

More ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’.

 I used the picture below a few years ago to share some of Bessler’s ways of hiding information in plain sight.

In the above picture Bessler used the alphabet to label the various parts.  In previous images he numbered all the parts and designed them to add up to a significant total. In this one we are required to convert the letters to numbers and add them together to arrive at another significant total.

The labels on the left side converted alphanumerically total 190

Those on the right similarly treated, total 170.  Addend together they total 360.

So with a total of 360, we then count the number of letters used, they run from ‘a’ through to ‘t’ and ‘t’ is the 20th letter.  As was done with all the drawings in DT, 360 divided by 20 gives us 18 again, the angle at the base of every single one in the pentagram.

But in place of the lettter ‘j’, Bessler places the number 10, which confusingly could be read as the letter ‘w’ - red-ringed in the above picture.  This must have been deliberate as ‘w’ is the RoT 13 version of the letter ‘j’, and ‘j’, of course is the alphanumeric version of the number 10.  So ‘j’, ‘w’ and ‘10’ are interchangeable.  ‘W’ is used by Bessler to indicate two letter ‘v’s and show them as linked together.

All this is supported by the frequent pointer to the importance of the number five and the geometric figure, the pentagram.

The reason for the pentagram is to tell us to use five mechanisms - or seven or nine.  It also allowed him to embed the pentagram in his drawings which was demonstrated by his inclusion of Euclid’s instruction on how to draw that figure.  It is also a convenient way to contain the important parts of the drawing, leading us to extract the important information.   I believe Bessler included two versions of his perpetual motion machine hidden in plain sight within that drawing and it is down to us to find the right configuration, the one that will work. 

This is all old stuff but I’ve published it again because either my visitors are new to the blog and unaware of all that’s gone before - or, frustratingly, all my efforts to lead people to the right answers is ignored, overlooked or dismissed as my obsessive, paranoid personality.  

Anyway I’ll continue to publish what I know and hope that one day someone will prove me right.

JC

Why Did Bessler Add the Name Johann to His Forenames?

One of Bessler’s clues which may have slipped past our attention is this one, it begs the question, why did he add the name Johann?

We are familiar with his use of the atbash code, the Caesar shift and the RoT13 code, and his addition of an extra two initials J and E to his original E for Elias Bessler.

He adopted his pseudonym, Orffyreus, by using the RoT13 code, which was a well-known code system in his time.  I think he knew this and expected those people who were curious would search for other clues within his published works, just as we have.

His use of a variety of codes included - alphanumerics, Caesar shift, chronograms (a sentence containing certain letters which can be interpreted as Roman Numerals and stand for a number when rearranged.) Steganography (the practice of hiding information within a different media such as embedding it invisibly within a drawing) - plus a few of his own invention.

I asked the question, why did he add the name Johann? He had already got two E’s to give two 5s, alphanumerically; then from the E to the R via the Caesar shift; and to 18 from R again, alphanumerically.  These all fit in perfectly to confirm the pentagram.  So why did he think it necessary to add the J.

J is the tenth letter alphanumerically, or W by the Caesar shift.  W is the 23rd letter.   I can’t think of a convincing reason for the number 23, so its purpose may be the fact that the W is composed of two  Vs.  But we already have two 5s, but the W which does however, provides two linked Vs. This might reflect Bessler’s statement that the weights worked in pairs

His use of the W was definitely an important clues and conceived as a clue right back in the beginning when he adopted the name Orffyreus,  

His initials after his forename additions were JEEB, and after the RoT13 change became WRRO. 

 But when converted to Roman numerals, before the addition, JEEB in Roman numerals 10, 5,5,2,, which then becomes XVVII.  If we stick with his chosen pseudonym, Orffyreus, then XVVO is the interesting result.

So we have a W which is composed of two linked Vs.

But there’s more.  Throughout his Apologia Poetica Bessler inserts numerous examples of rhyming couplets containing three Capital letters being the three initials of his ‘enemies’, Wagner, Gartner and Borlach - W,G and B.

 

Although the W looks a little like part of a scissor mechanism, I think its primary purpose is to confirm the linkage between each V.  Each V shows the action of a single lever, but indicates it’s starting and finishing points.  

In MT there are several examples of the letter A, some with a straight cross bar and others with a bent one, see the image below.

The letter A shown above might be part of scissor mechanism….or the two arms of the letter V?  I hope this post provides some interesting thoughts

Curiously the picture in DT showing the Weinstein wheel attached to an Archimedes pump, has three items labelled in a confusing way. For a start each part is labelled with a letter, running from the letter ‘a’ to the letter  ‘t’.  For some reason the letter ‘j’ is missing. The last letter listed is ‘t’.   But … there is what appears to be three items labelled with a W. Further examination of the letter W in this case, suggests it might actually be the number 10!  The missing ‘j’.

Back again soon.

JC 

Update and Apologies for the Hiatus.

 Sorry for my disappearing act, I’m still alive and kicking!  I was busy dealing with events unrelated to Bessler, but forgot I’d stopped the comment facility.  Hopefully it’s back on and working.

I’ve got some interesting posts lined up and I think they will generate a lot of comments.

I’ll try to get the first one posted tomorrow.

Thank you for your patience - normal service will resume today.

JC

The Toys Page or MT 138,139,140 and 141

 

As was pointed out in the BWForum, some pages were removed from the original MT and replaced by what I termed some 30 years ago the “Toys” page because Bessler refers to the drawing as Toys.  In addition he added the numbers 138, 139, 140 and 141 to the bottom of the drawing.  There are numerous examples in his drawings in DT of his predilection for numbering all the parts to achieve a significant total. He restricted the numbers used to no more than 24, and when the subsequent total was divided by 24 it produced another significant total, 55.

I won’t go into the significance of the number 55, because my reasons are speculative, and to me, meaningful, but generally they don’t seem to be accepted.  I shall be posting details of the extraordinary trouble Bessler took to make it clear that the number 55 was of the utmost importance.

MT 137 was deliberately inserted before the Toys page to make 138 a logical progression from 136, but also because the drawing, a dodecagram or “Circle of Fifths”, contains some interesting features not directly associated with Bessler’s wheel. The design is used in musical theory, but from Bessler’s perspective the MT number served a dual purpose - 138, 139, 140 and 141 total 558, and that total 18.  18 being the number that every angle in the pentagram is based on, I.e. 18,36,54, 72, 90 and 108.

MT 137

Bessler pointed at the relationship between 137 and the golden angle or the golden mean, well known to the ancient Egyptians and the Greeks who called it phi, after the Greek sculptor Phideas. Phi, the golden ratio, is equal to 1.618, plus an unending succession of numbers. Plato discussed the subject at length in his Timaeusand of course there are the Leonardo Fibonacci series of numbers, and the laws of nature also dependant on the gold mean!

In geometry, the golden angle is the smaller of the two angles created by dividing the circumference of a circle according to the golden ratio, thus creating two arcs so that the ratio of the length of the smaller arc to the length of the larger is the same as the ration of the larger arc to the full circumference of the circle.

This provides two radii with angles of two particular degrees. The golden angle is 137.508. I suspect that using the number 137 for his dodecagram was a useful hint at the circle of fifths, as well as filling the gap between 136 and 138.

The total of 141 is interesting.  It seems as though he wanted to get to that number and not beyond, but numbering the ‘Toys’ page 138 would seem to have been good enough.  141 is not a prime number and it’s only factors are 3 times 47.  If we turn to MT 47 we discover that inserted within  the drawing which is numbered 47, another number 47, twice in fact because one is the mirror image of the other so there are three number 47s present on the page. Is this a pointer to the number 141 or the reverse or is it just a coincidence?

Of course there 141 Bible quotations In Bessler’s Declaration of Faith in Apologia Poetica.  They are included within 220 lines or 55 stanzas.

I’ll publish my own interpretation of the Toys page next.

JC

PS. Click Bessler Wheel Pics at the top of right panel.  Click Home to come back to blog.

©️ John Collins 2026

Which Clues Are Helpful/Useful?

 I’m conscious that some people are criticising my expressed certainty about  the clues I’ve presented here. I understand completely and despite my certainty, of course I realise interpretation is a difficult task unavoidably involving one’s personal bias and viewpoint.  

The kind of clues I’ve presented tend to be mainly concerned with the drawings but there are some pieces of text where I have offered my interpretation, based on my knowledge of Bessler.

When I’ve challenged comments which dismiss my conclusions it is not meant to inflame discussion, it's just that I have arrived at my personal convictions after much deliberation and to have it routinely dismissed apparently with little consideration is mildly annoying, but I accept that I have probably over reacted.  So apologies to all. I do actually appreciate all comments both for and against.

I posted a lot of Bessler’s coded clues with my interpretations included, on my web site at

http://www.theorffyreuscode.com/

These are easily seen and understood but we still find it difficult to make use of these interpretations in preparing a Bessler wheel.   

Given that Bessler told us that he had left clues to help us find his solution we should pay attention to every clue we can find and try to obtain a particular configuration which offers a potential path to the solution.  That is why I’ve offered so much material with that aim in mind.

There are a number of clues which are not necessarily subject to the vagaries of interpretation, but which are not being regarded as helpful.  I merely point to the staggering quantity of pointers to the number five.  It has an always seemed to me that there is a curious avoidance of the more obvious conclusion that 5 mechanisms is a key ingredient.  Further to that, a number of clues suggest 7 or 9 mechanisms.  Surely the undoubted suggestion is that only an odd number of mechanisms will do.  Add to that thought, the actual instruction that the weights  act in pairs seems to me to fit very well with an odd number of weighted levers.

But in the end we have to find a concept which shows how we obtain a continuously rotating wheel, which consumes enough energy from a falling weight to supply more than enough energy to lift the fallen weight back up to its pre-fall position.

So before we can find the right configuration from Bessler’s clues we need the actual concept which supports the non-stop rotation of the wheel.

My previous suggestion is still, in my opinion, the only way achieve a working Bessler wheel and it is this.

The only source of energy available is that generated by the falling weight.  But how do we get enough energy to return that weight to its starting point? 

There are two features available from the action of the falling weight.  The first is to use the potential energy generated during the actual fall to guide the weight to the most advantageous landing point on the rim of the wheel. This is achieved through the use of the scissor mechanisms.

The second feature  requires us to configure the wheel to make the falling weight land further back along the rim of the wheel, than is usually achievable with a simple pivoting weighted lever.  This would cause the wheel to rotate further forward thus creating a larger retrograde motion in the previously fallen wheel.  This would reduce the height needed to return the fallen weight back to it pre-fall position.

Bessler stressed how useful scissor mechanisms are, and as he commented they are like crabs in that they work best when they move horizontally, and crabs are designed to move  sideways too. Because the scissor mechanisms are able to react to variations in the horizontal attitude, they can expand or shrink contract as their angles varies. 

If you look at my previous attempt you will see the scissor mechanism.  Where they begin to act is a problem I need to discover the solution, but also how large should they be and do they work with just one scissor or two like my model.

Finally they need to work in pairs which requires cords between two levers- but which ones?

One cord must be fixed to the falling lever, but the other end needs to be fixed to a lever which actually needs a bit of a lift, just 30 degrees is suggested by Bessler.

The concept I have described should work, if the parts are correctly placed, but to date I have failed. My skills and materials have depreciated due to my age and time.  I can no longer find the energy to test my theory.

There is a lot of material left to study but I’ll get around to publishing it one day 

Over to you guys!

JC

Thirty Degree Lift & The Great Craftsman Passage.

 

In 2017 I posted this interpretation of the “great craftsman passage.  Bessler wrote,

“A great craftsman would be he who, as a pound falls a quarter, four pounds shoots up four quarters”

This is an abbreviation of my original post. We saw in the first part that the word ‘quarter', referred to, not just 90 degrees but also to a clock.  In the second part the word ‘quarter' also refers to a clock but this time he has used the words ‘four quarters’. ‘Four quarter’s equals ‘one whole hour’.  Each hour on a clock is divided into 30 degrees, so the words ‘four quarters’ meaning ‘one hour’ as used here equals thirty degrees.  To paraphrase Bessler’s words, “a great craftsman would be he who, as one pound falls 90 degrees, causes each of the other four pounds to shoot upwards 30 degrees.”  

Fortunately Bessler provided more information about this clue. His second image in DT is shown below.

In the next picture notice the pentagram which joins the two pictures, also note the horizontal bar on the pendulum is exactly in line with the extended chord from the pentagram.

In the picture below notice besides the pentagram there is also another feature of all the illustrations in DT - his use of the numbering the parts. This time he only uses the numbers from 1 to 10, but added together they total 55 - there’s definitely a theme here! - and when all the numbers in the right hand picture are added together they also total 55.

In the illustration below, I have filled in the pentagram in red. Originally the two drawings were on adjacent but separate pages. In the crease of the binding there were two rows of black and white lines allowing one to push together the two pages to make a perfect join at their two black borders as in the illustration.

The red line extends the upper right side chord of a pentagram in the left hand drawing, to coincide with the centre of the right circle. The triangle has a bottom angle of 30 degrees, and an upper right angle of 72 degrees and the remaining one, 78 degrees, to complete the triangle.  In a pentagram that triangle has two 72 degree angles and one 36 degree but in this case the small bottom angle measures 30 degrees so the upper right one is 72 degrees which means the remaining one has to be 78 degrees.

Notice that in the the left picture the wheel contains horizontal hatchings and outside of the wheel they are vertical.  In the right picture the hatch marks are vertical and there are none outside the wheel.  The left picture is cut off on the right side. It looks as though we are meant to slide the right one over to the left, above the left one.

The elliptical or ovoid shape on the bottom of the triangle is designed to tell us to rotate the whole pendulum around it.  I realised this was necessary because of the three lines coming out of it seemed to suggest this as a possibility. and because we know the 30 degrees is the size of the lift required in Bessler’s connectedness principle.

In the above illustration I have copied across the large triangular pendulum and tilted it so that the centre of the three verticals coming out of the ovoid are located on the centre of the left side wheel and aligned with the hatching lines  The two weights identified with red circles fit precisely on the rope, showing the 30 degree lift. The blue lines demonstrate the position if we ignore red circled weights, which I think shows that they shouldn’t be ignored.  

I only moved the pendulum because I didn’t need to move the actual right hand wheel. But the right wheel rotated 90 degrees would align the two sets of hatch marks.

This picture shows graphically the desired lift of 30 degrees to match the craftsman text.

NB.  Subsequent to this post I found a second or corrective interpretation connected with the craftman passage. Instead of a fall of 90 degrees I propose a fall of just 45 degrees.

On a clock face, if the weighted pendulum fell from the twelve o’clock point to the six o’clock point, his maximum fall would be 180 degrees.  A quarter of 180 degrees is only 45 degrees, so to paraphrase Bessler’s words as he might have intended them to mean, “  “a great craftsman would be he who, as one pound falls a 45 degrees causes each of four pounds to shoot upwards 30 degrees.”

A more likely scenario?

Here’s a gift from Gustov :

JC

Identifying Bessler’s Clues and Trying to Interpret them,

 We who have researched the legend of Bessler’s wheel are firmly convinced that the device was genuine and the inventor’s claims true.  This, of course, goes against the published opinion of the world of science.  They have thoroughly denounced such devices as fraudulent and impossible. However a serious consideration of the evidence casts doubt on the professional opinion of these “experts”.

Johann Bessler spent an extraordinary amount of time writing his books, embedding numerous clues of an extremely diverse nature in both texts and graphics, all done to ensure that even after his death his clues would be found, deciphered and a version of his gravity wheel built and his name for ever be acknowledged as the true inventor of the gravitywheel.

So I too have spent many years finding and interpreting a host of clues which I always believed might/will eventually lead me to build a working model.

The clues I’ve found are visible to anyone once they are pointed out.  Some I may have deciphered or interpreted wrongly, but they are clearly real and not invisible.  These are not the same as other clues suggested by followers of a more mystical method which relies on psychic prediction.  These are invisible to the naked eye and therefore of little use in persuading non-mystics among the general public of our persuasion that the wheel was real.

Only the visible clues are helpful and even then they baffle us as to their correct meaning.

There is only one true way of persuading the world at large that Bessler’s wheel was genuine and that is to build a replica that actually works.  I have built many replicas that don’t work!

Of course if one of the more mystical revelations should lead to a working model, I would immediately and gladly accept that they were right and I was wrong!

JC

                              Copyright ©️2026 John Collins.

Some of Bessler’s Clues Hidden In Plain Sight.

I’ve often mentioned how Bessler liked to leave clues disguised amongst innocent seeming text and illustrations. In other words ‘Hidden in plain sight’, something that should have been easy to spot, but in fact was so unobtrusive that nobody noticed them, or they were part of something else of little interest. Bessler used the term ‘drawing a veil over something’ and then saying ‘when I lift the veil, etc. Also in MT11, he wrote “but there is more in it than meets the eye, as will be seen when I pull back the curtain and disclose the correct principle at the right time.

So here’s the first of so many clues that I’ve lost count.

The over-numbering

In his publications, Grundlicher Bericht (GB) and Das Triumphirende (DT) all of  the parts in Bessler’s illustrations were labelled and numbered. Two of his illustrations are shown below. 

 This 

In the above illustrations  notice the main pillar supporting the wheel is labelled 4, not once but three times. This is a common feature of all the illustrations in both GB and DT.

It is worth noting that he had only 24 numbers to play with and if he wanted to put enough numbers available in the illustration to achieve a certain total he had to repeat as many of them as he needed.  When all the numbers are added together their total is 660. To find the purpose of guiding us to this number, Bessler hides another clue within the illustration.

The clock.

One day I was idly drawing in the lines of perspective, aligning with the various parts in the illustration, in the Merseberg wheel drawing, fig 2. I noticed that they all centred on the point of rotation.  I became curious when I noted that the line upon which two weights were placed were each labelled ‘8’.  Could this represent the eight o’clock line on a clock face?

Yes. A quick study of the clock illustration shows the extent of the clock-face.  Notice that the twelve o’clock and the three o’clock lines are accurately placed, and as shown by the small red rings, the eight o’clock line is accurate also.   I had no idea why this was done, but that it was deliberate was clear and I eventually realised that the number twelve was a hint to divide the 660 total to obtain the number 55.

Yes it’s that number again, inserted in his name, and in other pictures and throughout his published books in various forms.  I’ll discuss the reasons for its ubiquity later. For now I want share another piece of hidden information.

The Enlargement of Bessler’s Wheel.

There are clues available which indicate that Bessler’s wheel as shown in both GB and the DT illustrations is actually larger than shown,  see the illustration below.

The meaning of one of the inconsistencies apparent in the illustrations in both fig 1 and fig 2, puzzled me for a long time.  In the drawing below, I have red-circled the upper two ends of the wheel supporting pillars.  Notice that they are higher than the two pairs to the left, they are green-circled.  To my eye this looked wrong, and the tops of the columns are different.  Why were they not all of equal height? If you look at the first two illustration you can see a short horizontal line on top of each of the two higher pillars.  I discovered that they were datum points, and intended to provide a reference to further alterations to the drawing. 

Given that the left end of the horizontal beam, shown in yellow below, extended just outside the wheel’s rim on the left side, I drew a circle with my compasses, centred on the wheel axle. which included its outer end.  I also included the two short lines on the pillars.

The outer circle is shown in blue in the second illustration below. I mentioned earlier, the other two datum points, not outlined in red or green, which are placed just to the left of the main wheel and are shown at different heights.  This confirms that the pentagram discussed earlier is deliberate,

In the illustration below, the green line is perfectly aligned with these two additional datum points as well as the hatching infill, and therefore runs parallel with the lower yellow chord which forms part of the pentagram shown many times before. 

https://johncollinsnews.blogspot.com/2023/04/johann-besslers-tilted-pentagram.html

The blue circle skims the bottom of the main pillar supporting the wheel. It also just touches the point of the triangular padlock and then aligns with the right edge of the illustration.

Why the padlock is numbered 24 in the GB illustration and 42 in the DT version

It has on occasion been regarded as a typo, but in fact it was done deliberately.  There is no way such carefully crafted number could accidentally been carved wrongly.  In my opinion it was done for one reason - how would someone correct it without physically altering it?  I believe we are meant look at it upside down in effect swapping the two numbers 4 and 2, to read 2 and 4.  The picture could looked be at in a mirror, or flipped horizontally or vertically, but in the end I think Bessler intended us to simply rotate it 180 degrees.

The design hidden within the wheel drawing, includes five weighted levers.  By turning the picture upside down, the next lever to fall can be seen in the illustration below.

In my last build I introduced scissor mechanisms to push the falling weighted lever further back towards the following yellow radius.

The Shadows Clues.

Note in the following illustrations the differences between how the shadows are drawn.  In the DT picture the shadows cast upon the ground are changed in direction in parts of the whole picture compared with GB1.  I think that the purpose of the shadow change is to create a separation of one side from the other.  So the shadows under the wheel in the DT version of the Merseberg wheel point the opposite way to those on the left and to how they were first shown in the drawing of the first version of the Merseberg GB wheel.  

In the first picture below, the shadows all point to the left, but in the next one you can see that the shadows under the main wheel point to the left, but those in the left half point to the right. 

In the picture above I have included a close up of the two versions for ease of comparison.

——————————————————————————————————

There is a lot to take in here but there is so much more, and now I’ve started I’ll keep posting more information.  It does take me some time to collect and present the information in an abbreviated form so I’ll probably not post a second collection for a few days.  I hope you all enjoy it and perhaps it will ignite more enthusiasm for the project and maybe we will discover the actual solution.

I’m considering opening another page on which to post any of your pictures if acceptable.

JC

Copyright ©️2026 John Collins.