When he asked his minister to approach Bessler and find out if he was genuine, I thought Karl, the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, was considering the possibility of employing Bessler's wheel to pump water to the top of a new ornamental cascade he had built in his Castle gardens. However there was always going to be the problem of how he could actually pump the water. An archimedes screw couldn't do it and there was no system available at that time that could raise the water more than a few feet.
So, I wondered, why did Karl go ahead and build the cascade if he had no way of pumping the water up to the top once it had fallen? The answer is simple and I saw it in action when I visited the famous Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, England where they have an almost identical cascade.
Chatsworth's cascade, built at exactly the same time as the Kassel cascade is set in the 105-acre garden of Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, the Duke of Devonshire's family home. The cascade, finally completed in 1701, is fed by four man-made lakes. The Cascade drops down over 200 vertical feet. All the waterworks in the garden are gravity-fed, with water piped from the lakes which are 400 feet higher than the house. The water flows down over the cascade to an ornamental lake where it powers a fountain with a jet of water approaching 300 feet in height!
Work on the Hesse-Kassel cascade began in 1701, inspired by Landgrave Karl's visit to a Villa in Italy. Just as at Chatsworth, the water runs down the cascades, a fall of about 300 feet, before pouring into a lake by the castle, to feed another fountain about 150 feet in height. This whole system is fed from reservoirs of rainwater and relies on gravity. Both these systems have been in place for more than 300 years.
So the reason for Karl's interest in Bessler's wheel was simply personal curiosity, just as he enjoyed Denis Papin's experiments on the lake near his castle in earlier times. In 1705 Papin developed a second steam engine with the help of Gottfried Leibniz, based on an invention by Thomas Savery, but this used steam pressure rather than atmospheric pressure. Details of the engine were published in 1707. During his stay in Kassel in Hesse, in 1704, he constructed a ship powered by his steam engine, mechanically linked to paddles. This made him the first to construct a steam-powered boat (or vehicle of any kind). [Thanks to wikipedia and others]
I think that Karl thought that, with Papin gone, similar scientific experiments might be made using Bessler's wheel. It also explains why Karl was not interested in buying the wheel - he had no use for it. He was well-known for his interest and understanding of the latest scientific theories and experiments.
JC
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