I'm continually surprised that Bessler's wheel is still regarded as a fraud. 52 years ago (approximately) I read the maid's account of how she supposedly turned the wheel and I immediately knew it was wrong. How could a piece of mechanism turn the twelve foot wheel through the bearings? How could it reach a top speed 26 RPM in just three turns? How was such a mechanisms hidden in open bearings? How was it hidden during the change over from one set of bearings to another? If it was a fraud and the maid was simply mistaken or fooled into thinking that was how it was done , how else could it have been done?
Which leads us to pondering what force was accessable internally which could be used to turn the wheel? I have seen the suggestions of ambient temperature changes and I dismiss it with the same gut feeling I originally had when reading about the maid's version of events. Later consideration only added weight to my original conviction that it would not do. I am convinced, satisfied and know that it could only have been gravity supplying the weights with the necessary force and therefore energy.
Instead of shooting us gravity-driven wheel proponents down, I wish the shooters would offer alternative theories which were at leastt as acceptable as the gravity-only ones. We need theories which offer the same quick response, allowing speedy acceleration of the wheel. My personal belief is that there isn't one, but if people wish to dismiss gravity-driven wheels and yet find no fault in my argument that the wheel was not fraudulent, then they must offer some kind of suggestion of what force would suffice. It's no good saying that the wheel was genuine but gravity cannot be used in this way but they can't think of anything else.
It's as clear as daylight to me that gravity provided the energy source, Bessler said so too, and there is no alternative anyway.
JC
John you are right,..It is 100% gravity that turns the wheel.
ReplyDeleteMy reference to a secret principle does not imply that he used any other kind of force.
I am merely stating that he discovered some thing about a pendulum that is not entirely obvious to the casual observer.
This,with a special mechanism allows one to take advantage of this property and use it to raise the weights.
John, the problem I have with gravity wheels is that nobody can produce one, either in reality, or a computer model, that actually works.
ReplyDeleteAs I said in my comment at the end of your last blog, I now have a computer model of a wheel that would, ignoring friction etc, deliver about 33 watts for ten 10kg weights rising and falling through one meter, when rotating at 600 rpm.
I'm quite happy to disclose the operating principle: it exploits the Earth's centrifugal acceleration field, where the force F on a mass m is given by F = mω²r, where ω = the Earth's rotational speed = 0.00007292115 rad/sec, and r = Earth's radius, say 6371000km at the equator.
Substituting gives F = 0.3388 newtons, for a 10kg mass. If that force moves the mass upwards through 1 meter, that delivers 0.3388 joules.
For this principle, gravity is just a nuisance, and it must always be nullified. (How that is done is just a detail at this stage, but it could be by using constant-force springs between each weight and Earth, or just by balancing each ascending weight with a descending weight).
At first sight it might seem that any energy gain achieved by an ascending weight must be cancelled out when it descends. But it is possible to have each weight descend without being influenced by Earth's centifugal acceleration field. There are several ways to do that, mostly impractical (e.g. weights travelling east to west at about 465 m/s while descending) but there is one practical way, which I won't expand on here.
A correction to the above: r = Earth's radius = 6371000 meters, not km, at the equator.
DeleteThe calculation giving F = 0.3388 newtons is still correct.
Arktos, extremely interesting! Knowing your skills with finite element analysis and/or other software tools, I find this of great importance. As you know I had a definite gain as well using parametric oscillators. I wonder if that's related to your findings.
DeleteAndre, I am doing some more analysis, and will soon face the problem of whether to commit to designing a real-world model — a lot of work! It would need to be a high-precision device. If I use 10kg weights, they will only appear to act as 0.03 kg weights, yet they still need to have their full weights accurately balanced, etc. As for parametric oscillators, I'm sure you have done more work on them than I have. I haven't used them in this principle.
DeleteWell, I have to disagree with some of the concepts presented in this blog.
ReplyDeleteI prefer to describe Bessler's wheels as "gravity activated" rather than "gravity driven". While gravity certainly was necessary in order to make Bessler's wheels run and output energy / mass to both accelerate a wheel and allow it to operate axle attached machinery, that energy / mass did NOT come from the Earth's gravity field, but, rather, from the WEIGHTS within the rotating wheel's drum. If EITHER there were no weights within a wheel (and also assuming lever mass was neglible) OR there was no local planetary gravity field affecting the weights OR there were no weights or gravity field(!), then a wheel could not operate. However, it would still have been possible to make a wheel with massive weights run even if there was no local planetary gravity field present!
For example, if one could take a Bessler's wheel out into space and place it aboard a large rotating wheel type space station (the kind depicted in, say, the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey), then the artificial gravity, actually just CF, created by the station's rotation would also allow the Bessler wheel to operate. In this case there is no normal planetary gravity field present inside the station.
No planetary gravity field or CF present? No problem. A Bessler wheel could STILL operate even under these conditions!
Without any planetary gravity field or rotating space station CF present (perhaps for a non-rotating space station located in "deep space" between star systems) one could use an electric field to make a Bessler wheel run. Just give its lead weights a high electrostatic charge and then give the floor below the wheel an equally large charge of opposite polarity. The wheel will run, but in this case it would be "electrically activated" (however, if the electrical charges where too high, then mutual repulsion between the weights might interfer with the lever shifting taking place). In fact, if the weights and flooring were replaced with magnets of suitable strength and polarity, it might even be possible to have a "magnetically activated" Bessler wheel with the energy / mass of the wheel's magnets being drained to accelerate the wheel and operate outside machinery (again, the strength of the magnets, if too high, might interfer with performance).
In a prior comment I even suggested that it might be possible to make a Bessler type wheel that did not use weights or even need a gravity field! That wheel would use stretched springs that would span the distance between the ends of a wheel's levers and another eccentric rotating disk located outside of and parallel to the Bessler wheel. Such a wheel would actually be able to use the small changes in the energy / masses of the stretching and contracting springs that took place during wheel rotation to both accelerate the wheel and perform outside work.
Regardless of the type of system used to "activate" a Bessler wheel, the common denominator is that, for a wheel with 8 active components, during any 45 degree increment of drum rotation, there are always more components "rising" in the drum than there are "sinking". That, coupled with interconnections between the components, will then always keep a "center of force" displaced away from the axle and located on the drum's "descending" side. With the maintenance of such a displaced center of force, a wheel will continue to output energy / mass until there is none left in its "activated" components.
Correction to my last comment
ReplyDeleteI wrote in the last paragraph of that comment that "...there are always more components "rising" in the drum than there are "sinking". This should have been "...there are always more components "sinking" in the drum than there are "rising".
Sorry about that. I haven't had my morning coffee yet!
You're right technoguy, careless language on my part! Gravity-actuated of course. I also agree with you Trevor. Arktos, I have to admit that I don't fully understand your idea but I remain open-minded about it until I believe or know different - or agree because I do understand it!
ReplyDeleteJC
John, this idea started by recognising that what we normally consider to be a "fixed" laboratory frame is really rotating with Earth, and then thinking about what would happen to a mass that had no gravitational attraction at all, but still retained its inertial properties. See http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=284 for more. In that case the mass would accelerate upwards in the Earth's centrifugal acceleration field, gaining energy in doing so. (I mean that it accelerates and gains energy in the laboratory frame, which is what matters. The source of the energy is the rotating Earth. The mass can also be given any reasonable starting velocity).
ReplyDeleteThat centifugal acceleration field is analogous, in its effect on the mass, to an upwards-directed gravity field. Although it is at best only about 0.3% of the strength of gravity, it can, unlike gravity, be made inactive on the mass when required. So every time the "weightless" mass rises, it gains energy which it doesn't have to give up when it falls.
Surely Arktos,..This would lead to an eventual slowing down of the earth even if it could be accomplished?!!
ReplyDelete@ Trevor,
ReplyDeleteYes, as energy was taken from the Earth, it would slow down, just as is already occuring from the various tidal power schemes (like the Rance scheme) which are currently taking energy from Earth. But remember that Earth has an enormous amount of stored rotational energy, about 2.14 × 10^29 joules, so the amount of slowing so far has been negligible.
@ Technoguy
ReplyDeleteIt just so happens that I have been a keen bird-lover for more than 45 years. I have seriously studied bird behaviour and anatomy. I have for example, kept, bred and shown fancy pigeons, for more than 20 years. The fact is that on many occasions due to my knowledge and experience I have been invited to ‘Judge at Show’. For me ‘The Storks Bills’ clue, or ‘The correct application of the storks bills’ clue has been of particular interest. I know that storks never open their beaks so far as to emulate a ‘scissor jack’, and so, so far as Bessler’s clues are concerned, there has always been an interesting anomaly therein.
There is no ‘vertical displacement’ of the main driving (or flywheel) weights, and that is what my question sought to elucidate from you in helping me to find ‘the lost quote’; which I believe is either in AP or DT and not MT.
JW
@ JW
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I follow what you are saying about "vertical displacement" and the "main driving weights" inside of Bessler's wheels.
The weights in Bessler's wheels were located at the ends of levers as depicted in such drawings as MT 13. As a lever's pivot moved from the 6:00 position of a CW rotating drum to its 9:00 position, the lever would swing CCW around its pivot and then be undergoing a vertical drop as the distance between the weight and the axle decreased. From 9:00 to 12:00 the lever would suddenly reverse direction and begin turning CW around its pivot as its weight vertically rose back toward its rim stop again and its distance from the axle increased. Finally, as the lever's pivot traveled from 12:00 to 3:00, the lever would continue to turn CW about its pivot as its weight then sank toward its rim stop and made final contact with it at 3:00 (actual contact was probably a bit earlier than that). From 3:00 to 6:00 a weight would rest on its rim stop and undergo no vertical rising or sinking with respect to its rim stop. When any two of a wheel's 8 weights was moving between 3:00 and 6:00, it would, temporarily, not be participating in the lifting of the two weights moving between 9:00 and 12:00.
The motions of the weights at any instant were actually a combination of vertical and horizontal motions, but, as far as the energetics of the wheel were concerned, it was really only the verical components of these motions that counted.
To make the CoM of a drum's weights stay on the descending side of the axle, every bit of energy / mass lost by the four sinking weights during each 45° of drum rotation had to be directly transfered to the two weights which were rising between 9:00 and 12:00. This required a VERY clever system of interconnecting cords.
Unfortunately, this cord system, by itself, was still not able to do the job of lifting the ascending side weights and Bessler had to resort to using the additional application of spring tension to the levers to finally make those ascending side levers rise "in a flash" as their pivots passed the 9:00 position of the CW rotating drum.
When one finally has Bessler's design, he will notice that, for low drum rotation rates, a weighted lever will almost immediately stop and then reverse the direction of its rotation around its pivot as it passes the 9:00 position of the drum (that is, the weighted lever will go from rotating CCW about its pivot to going CW about the pivot). If this sudden change in rotation direction is not happening at low drum rotation rates (like those immediately after startup), but is delayed until nearly 45° of drum rotation have occurred, then one, although on the "right track", has still not arrived at his final destination and the CoM of his wheel will not remain fixed on the drum's descending side from one 45° increment of drum rotation to the next. The result, of course, will be a design whose CoM merely oscillates about an equilibrium position at the wheel's "punctum quietus" point below the axle.
As far as that quote from either AP or DT is concerned, I can't find it in any of my collection of "relevant" quotes from these texts, but that does not mean it is not in them somewhere. Keep asking about it from time to time and maybe someone will be able to cite the page it is on for you.
There is a lot of incorrect information in this little corner of the Internet.
Delete@JW
ReplyDeleteHow far do storks open their beaks?
And a bit of trivia:
There is also plant called a "storks bill". It is of the Geranium family being the genus "erodium". It is native to Europe. The fruit of the plant containing the seeds greatly resembles the head and beak of a miniature stork.
As far as taking energy from the earth,I feel an area that is sadly neglected is in the field of underground thermal heat.Norway's electricity is cheap because they rely on hot springs for power.
ReplyDeleteThere is enough heat underground to supply heat for thousands of years and their are literally thousands of sites in the world that could replace the need for nuclear power stations.
This energy is clean and pollution free and I cannot understand why this option is being neglected.
This in tandem with Perpetual motion would be the solution to our energy needs.
Over the years (decades actually) I've seen various schemes proposed to "tap" the Earth's rotational energy. These involve such things as the CF differential with altitude, gyroscopic devices, and even the Foucault Pendulum Effect. The problem with all of these is that, in order to get commercially useable amounts of power, one needs huge devices that are just too impractical to build / maintain.
ReplyDeleteAnd, really, these things aren't necessary as a source of energy. A single brick contains enough energy / mass to vaporize an entire town or heat and cool its homes for a century. The problem is releasing that energy.
Bessler's wheels were able to release the energy / mass of their active weights and did so at a safe rate. Unfortunately, that rate was VERY slow compared to what is needed to make his wheels a commercially viable source of power. However, AFTER we finally obtain the design he used, then it MIGHT be possible to improve that situation a bit. Meanwhile, I'm not in a hurry to sell off any of my oil company stocks just yet!
@Technoguy
ReplyDeleteI too am also unclear exactly what YOU mean by ‘vertical displacement’ with regard to your design for A Gravity Wheel. With regard to my design for A Gravity Wheel inspired by Bessler’s clues, let me try to clarify my understanding. The main ‘drive weights’, ‘heavy weights’ or ‘flywheel weights’ as I called them in my last posting are of course constantly ‘in motion’ around the axle and so in that sense they are always being ‘displaced’, however they are not, at the vertical stage in their revolution in the wheel’s momentum moving from a position they had already obtained previously in the cycle. They are (as it were) ‘temporarily locked’ in a position between axle and ‘rim’.
Few I think would disagree that Karl’s remark about ‘The Carpenter’s Boy’ is anything less than a Key-Clue in this adventure. His observation strongly suggests to me a preponderance of simple wooden elements. IF the internal workings of Bessler’s Wheel were as you said on 5th March, requiring “a VERY clever system of interconnecting cords” then surely Karl would have chosen to say that a ‘Cabin Boy’ (ordinary seaman?) or a ‘Weavers Apprentice’ could reproduce the mechanism given only five minutes to study it, and he would not have chosen The Carpenters Boy?
Given the path that I have followed through Bessler’s clues, your recent comment on this blogg that Verse 55 is “not worth bothering with” (I paraphrase) was truly, absolutely, SHOCKING.
And as for sub-wheels and elements in counter-clockwise rotation, words fail me…
Thank you for taking the time to consider the passage that I might possibly/perhaps be temporarily unable to find. I did hope that JC himself would step into our conversation and guide us all to ‘the lost quote’, however I imagine he has now abandoned his manuscript and is suddenly very busy in his workshop.
I do not like pseudonyms and anonymousness ’users’ and I tend not to respond to them. If you would care to furnish me with your real (Polish?) name, qualifications and location, I MIGHT send you more information.
My Bessler Website email address is john@factumpoetica.org
JW
PART I:
ReplyDelete@ JW
Sorry for the confusion. Most likely, the problem is that you have a certain image in your mind of how the internal mechanics of Bessler's wheels were configured and you are trying, unconsciously, to make the design I am describing fit your image. Perhaps I can help end the confusion with the following description.
I conceive of Bessler's wheels as being, basically, very similar to MT 13, but with a few major exceptions. In that wheel we see that the weights at the ends of the levers swing CCW away from their rim stops as lever pivots travel from the 6:00 to 9:00 position of a CW rotating drum (thus, the weights drop vertically WITH RESPECT TO THEIR RIM STOPS during this interval of their lever pivot's travel around the axle). Once a lever arrives at 9:00, however, it STOPS rotating about its pivot (and, therefore, its attached weight no longer undergoes vertical motion with respect to its rim stop) and this lever's weight will not begin rising with respect to its rim stop and as its lever then rotates CW until that extended arm on the back of the lever contacts the wheel mounted on the extended end of that odd axle mounted "half moon" pendulum. Once that happens, the weighted lever, as its pivot approaches the 12:00 position of the drum, will suddenly swing CW about its pivot until its weight contacts its rim stop. Then, from the 12:00 to 6:00 position of the drum, each weight will remain in contact with its rim stop and undergo NO further vertical motion with respect to it. This design, unfortunately, does not work because the vertical sinking of the wheel's ascending side weights between 6:00 and 9:00 with respect to their rim stops does not output enough energy / mass during 30° of CW drum rotation to be able to, through the structure of the wheel, supply a weighted lever approaching the 12:00 position with enough energy / mass to lift its weight back into contact with its rim stop.
In the actual wheels that Bessler build, however, there is, I am VERY convinced, a major departure from what happens in the MT 13 wheel. This departure in his one-directional wheels and the one-directional "sub wheels" of his two-directional wheels is that a weighted lever BEGINS to swing CW around its pivot AS SOON AS it passes the 9:00 position of the drum. Each lever that passes the 9:00 position of the drum will continue to swing CW about its pivot until its weight finally makes contact with its rim stop, NOT at the 12:00 postion of the drum, but, rather, at the 3:00 position of the drum. So, in Bessler's wheels, this "climbing back" to the rim stop by a lever's weight required 180° of drum rotation and not 30° as in the case of MT 13. And, of course, in Bessler's wheels there was not half moon pendulum hanging from the portion of axle inside of the drum. There was NOTHING attached to, penetrating, or even near the axle sections inside of his drums.
PART II:
ReplyDeleteThis miracle of mechanics required that the levers were interconnected together by a system of cords...actually DOZENS of cords of various lengths that were arranged into discreet "layers" so that no two cords would rub together as they transfered energy / mass between weights that were VERTICALLY sinking and rising WITH RESPECT TO THEIR RIM STOPS. Even with this system, however, the design would only work if each lever was further "assisted" to rise by a spring attached to it. Determing exactly HOW Bessler counter balanced the weight of his ascending side levers is the most difficult part of solving the Bessler wheel mystery and will be the LAST detail that a "right track" mobilist will determine. I am not quite there yet myself.
Karl would have seen these weighted levers and their interconnecting cords and assisting springs and would have been impressed by the simplicity of the CONSTRUCTION...only cylindrical lead weights, wooden levers, cords, and some steel springs and no complicated gear trains as found in various clocks and automata of the time. Bessler would have explained the basic operating principle to the count and then, perhaps, let the him slowly turn a small table top model's drum so that he could see with his own eyes the levers shifting smoothly between 6:00 and 3;00 as I've described above. Whenever the count released the model's drum, he would have noted that the small one-directional wheel would immediately begin turning and accelerating. After a few minutes of this, the count would then have had NO doubt that Bessler had, in fact, found a WORKING PM gravity wheel design. And, yes, it was so "simple" that a "carpenter's boy" could understand and build it. However, that does not mean the lad could just take a quick peek at a wheel and have a working model ready a week later! He would have needed some sort of schematic that Bessler would have provided him with that would have specified the shape of the levers, the sets and lengths of cord needed, the size and tensions of the springs, and, of course, the points on the levers to which they had to be attached.
Sorry to "shock" you, but I think that AP Chapter 55 is virtuallly WORTHLESS when it comes to trying to "reverse engineer" Bessler's wheels. The only thing I find of interest in it is the reference to the wheel looking like a "peacock's tail" when the sides of the drum were uncovered. That is a reference to the appearance of the radial drum supports, the "perpetual motion structures" they held, and the various cords interconnecting them (possibly dyed various colors in order to make identifying them easier). Yes, a very "poetic" comparison, but of little use to the mobilist trying to rediscover the exact design Bessler used.
Sorry John, I saw the request for the quote but I do not recall it. The only one I can think of, and it doesn't really help, is the one from Apologia Poetica "A crab crawls from side to side. It is sound,for it is designed thus."
ReplyDeleteJC
I believe Rlortie on besslerwheel constructed a wheel that could be turned from another room like Borlach's picture. He said it wasn't that difficult.
ReplyDelete