Thought for the day - String's the thing!

I have long believed that Johann Bessler used some cord, or string if you prefer, in each of his mechanisms.  I'm sure that this statement will please at least one contributer to this blog, but I insist that there was only one cord per mechanism.  In his Apologia Poetica, XLVI, Bessler included a strange passage which contained the following comment :-

The dog creeps out of his kennel just as far as his chain will stretch.

This has always seemed to me to describe a flexible link from the 'kennel' to the 'dog', and a piece of chain is similar to a length of cord in that you can pull with it but you can't push.  It is a reversable, one-way, force transmitter.which can only pull.  In his Maschinen Tractate No 9, Bessler writes

nothing is to be accomplished with any device unless my principle of connectedness is activated.

I think his  principle of connectedness referred to the cord or chain he described in the first quote above.  As I've said before, the word connectedness implies a  degree of connection and also leads one to conclude that two items are indeed connected, no matter that it is not a rigid connection.  What would be the point of such a connection?

If the 'dog'  'creeps' out of its kennel, it seems like a slow action as if it is dragging a weight. Before this action Bessler writes:-

cat slinks silently along and snatches nice juicy mice

This looks like  a much quicker action and it takes place before the slow action of the dog,  I think the mice refer to weights as do the horses mentioned later in the same passage.  So a quick action followed by a slower one might be the falling of a weight (quick) then the slower replacement of the same weight.

The point of having a flexible connection seems to me to suggest that the weight drives its second weight into the desired position, but gravity is allowed to act in returning it because if the connection is rigid the mechanism will remain balanced.

JC

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