Work on my wheel has stopped, currently, due to unexpected developments within my family circle. I may have to leave things 'til my return from holiday. Unfortunately I will be away on the 300th anniversary, and because finishing the wheel will be delayed, that means my intention to publish everything will also be delayed, but I will get back to work on it as soon as I can.
I'm sure there may be some who think I'm welching on my promise to share what I've been working on and in order to try to satisfy those who think that way, I will post a few more clues before I go on holiday. Upon my return I shall try to finish the document and the video asap and publish both freely.
It has often been said that we won't know if a successful wheel was the same as Bessler's or not. But I think we will know. I, for one, have based my design on some drawings he left and it will become very clear which ones.
Johann Bessler left dozens of clues about how his wheel worked and expected that someone would eventually work out all the clues and make a working wheel. But there have been mistakes, and incorrect assumptions and mostly a complete dismissal of his clues.
(5th clue)
The commonest error is the belief that his comment on the front of His Maschinen Tractate applied strictly to the drawings it contained.
“N.B. 1st May 1733. Due to the arrest, I burned and buried all papers that prove the possibility. However, I have left all demonstrations and experiments since it would be difficult for anybody to see or learn anything about a perpetual motion from them or to decide whether there was any truth in them because no illustration by itself contains a description of the motion; however, taking various illustrations together and combining them with a discerning mind, it will indeed be possible to look for a movement and, finally to find one in them.”
In fact only the toys drawings in MT contains useful information. There are additional hints in MT137 and in the letters 'A' which he used in MT, and there are hints too in some of the illustration numbers. The remaining drawings he was referring to are the four which appeared in his Das Triumphirende and of course Grundlicher Bericht and in a small way the one at the end of Apologia Poetica. These four drawings which contain the infamous pendulums also hold almost everything you will need to build his wheel.
It is a source of continual amazement to me that no one seems to have grasped the real reason for the presence of the pendulums. They are there to help you construct Bessler's wheel as he designed it. I can't put it more plainly than that. Now I have suspected this for almost the whole time I've been studying Bessler and I have a feeling that I'm not alone. I think that the others who, like myself, have suspected the true purpose for the pendulums have kept quiet in the hope that they might succeed through tireless experimentation of the many many variations available using the visible clues.
NOTE
No pendulum was ever described by a witness.
Bessler said that they were required to even out any inconsistencies in the rotation of the wheel, but the truly equable nature of the wheel's rotation was commented on in writing more than once.
I suggested that the pendulums were there to make the rather dull illustrations more interesting, but even as I wrote that I in 1997 I was already convinced that the true reason was so that someone "with a discerning mind etc etc."
I have other clues of a more specific nature concerning the drawings which I will post in the next few days.
PS There is a copyright notice at the bottom of the page but I have no objection to these pages being commented on elsewhere and the material copied and pasted as long as proper acknowledgemetn to me is given. A reference such as http://johncollinsnews.blogspot.co.uk/ will suffice.
JC
