Saturday 4 July 2009

Heatwaves, patents and codes

This last week has seen unusually warm, humid weather here in England. The temperature in my workshop hit 93 degrees fahrenheit several days in a row and it has proved to be too hot and way too humid to stay in there, even with the doors at either end open, so I have had to postpone work on reconstructing Bessler's wheel. Thankfully things have eased and the temperature has fallen to a more reasonable 82F and I can now return to work. The backplate is finished and one of the mechanisms is also finished but not perfect yet. It has been more difficult than I thought to get the mechanism to operate as I 'saw' it working, but I'm getting there and this weekend should see it functioning correctly. Once that is done its simply a case of copying it a number of times and fitting the rest of them to the backplate.

I've received a couple of emails suggesting that I should reconsider my belief that, should it be successful, this reconstruction should not be patented. Their arguments were strongly made but in the end patented or not, someone somewhere will improve it, apply for that improvement patent and mine will be just a record of who first patented the original, which is nice but if I want it I can get that recognition without the hassle of a patent application.

Again I have received numerous questions regarding Bessler's code and I have done my best to answer them without actually giving away anything prematurely. The sketches of the mechanisms I referred to in an earlier blog are available for all to see, you just need to know how to decode the information you're seeing. Bessler himself referred the reader to some 'drawings' and that is what I am doing. But the codes are in all of his works - without exception - and they are not always in the form of drawings!

You need to read his 'Grundlicher Bericht', 'Apologia Poetica', Das Triuphirende...' and of course 'Maschinen Tractate' in order to view all of his encoded material. The best clue I can give you is that the codes are partially alphanumeric and partially alphabetical substitution - and that isn't really new information because as everyone knows he encoded his name 'Bessler' by transposing the letters of the first half of the alphabet with those of the second in order to get his pseudonym 'Orffyreus'. Just because we are familiar with that fact should not be a reason to ignore it - it was a deliberate clue just as the one at the beginning and the end of the Apologia was an example of alphanumeric substitution.

One more thing; it has been suggested that the codes are vague and were there simply to enable Bessler to be able to point to the clues should someone else claim to have been the first to invent the gravitywheel. I can emphatically dismiss this point of view because it is as clear as daylight that Bessler anticipated a post humous acceptance that he had discovered the secret and that his claims would be vindicated shortly after his death. For this reason it is safe to assume that there was a significant clue left behind him, in addition to the more obscure ones I have discovered. I must assume that it was either in the windmill from which he fell, or (more likely) it was included somehow in the tomb which he was permitted to construct in his garden.

I shall continue this theme in another post.

JC

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