When Bessler left Karl's employment he continued to invent new ways of using his gravity-enabled engine, describing ever-lasting fountains, continuously-playing carillons and even a submarine capable of providing continuous fresh air. All of these clearly depended on the driving force of his self-moving wheel. This fact alone supports the view that he was honest. But his last invention was potentially a winner, if only he had succeeded in finishing it. He fell to his death from a new kind of windmill which had a vertical axle and presented its sails to the wind regardless of what ever direction it came from.
The earliest recorded windmill of this design was found to be of Persian origin, and was invented around 500–900 AD. This design was called a panemone, with vertical lightweight wooden sails attached by horizontal struts to a central vertical shaft. It was first built to pump water, and subsequently modified to grind grain as well. Later the Savonius wind turbine was invented by the Finnish engineer Sigurd Johannes Savonius in 1922. This design bears a a surprising similarity to the yin-yang symbol familiar to the Japanese and Chinese. There are some who support the idea that the yin-yang design originated in ancient times in China where it was originally a windmill very similar to a Savonius windmill, and which was used for pumping water and grinding corn, and whose design gradually became associated with the religious leaders of that era and subsumed within the Taoist belief system. Certainly it can be argued that the attributes belonging to the yin-yang are similar to the associations applicable to a gravity wheel, as for instance this description, "yin and yang,literally meaning heavy and light, and it is used to describe how polar opposites or seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn in relation to each other. Yin and yang are not opposing forces, but rather complementary ones, that interact to form a greater whole, as part of a dynamic system". I may say more about this in my next post.
These windmills with their vertical axes present their blades parallel to the wind and reflect the same attitude as gravity does, acting on a gravity-enabled wheel. It takes but a moment's thought to see that Bessler must have considered the attitude his wheels had to have, in order to take advantage of the downwards force of gravity and he applied the same logic to a windmill to take advantage of the wind. Unfortunately his desired position on the top of a hill was denied him and it is doubtful if it would have worked where he was forced to build it, lower down in the village of Furstenberg. It is unclear exactly how his sails were designed although I have posted the only known drawings of it, left to us at my website at http://www.orffyreus.org/ It is possible that drawings exist showing the details of his planned sails and these might give some indication of his design for the gravity-enabled wheels.
Perhaps the design of Johann's gravity wheel gave him the idea of adapting some of its features for use in his new windmill. This would seem to imply that he also thought of gravity as similar to the force of the wind. During his years of research we know he studied wind and water mills carefully and must have linked the forces of wind and water to that of gravity and come to the conclusion that they were similarly capable of driving a wheel.
JC
