Levers, Weights and Perpetual Motion Wheels

When I began my research into Bessler's wheel, 50 odd years ago (!), I used paper, pencil, ruler compasses and a protractor, not much has changed; I still prefer doing the initial design on paper before recording it on my computer.

My first thoughts were to try to design a way of making the weights keep further from the centre of rotation, or try to get more of them on one side than the other -  and that is pretty well the same thing today - that the vast majority of people try to achieve.

But, as I progressed by trial and error - mainly error - one of the mistakes I made many years ago involved the different effects experienced by a lever with a weight on one end, a pendulum if you like, when attached to a wheel.  I'm sure that most people are aware of this simple phenomenon, but as I still get designs emailed to me which ignore this effect, I thought it useful to describe it here.

A pendulum whether swinging or stationary, applies its weight to the pivot.  In other words, gravity pulls down on the weight and the pull is experienced at the pivot. For the sake of this argument I ignore other pulls experienced by the pendulum when swinging.  One of the typical features of perpetual motion designs includes the use of these weighted levers. 

Consider this; a lever with a weight on one end is attached to a pivot mounted at some place on the wheel, say half way between the centre and the rim.  When the wheel is stationary the pendulum hangs straight down, and its weight is experienced at the pivot.  If the wheel is slowly rotated, the lever remains hanging from the pivot while it counter-rotates relative to the wheel, and the weight of the pendulum is still born by the pivot and felt at that point.

If a stop is placed in the path of the counter-rotating pendulum, and this will inevitably be part of the design, then the pendulum is prevented from further motion relative to the wheel; the pull of weight is no longer experienced at the pivot but is then moved to the position on the wheel occupied by the weight. 

 This means that the pull from the weight has moved across the face of the wheel at the the instant that the pendulum comes up against the stop.

Should the wheel be rotated by hand until the pendulum is able to fall again, its weight during the fall, is negligible because it is in free fall and the pivot does not bear the weight and neither does the wheel, so the wheel has lost that portion of its total weight - until, that is, the weight hangs vertically again from its pivot.

So the position in which the weight is supported, or experienced, and where it affects the wheel, moves between the pivot itself and the weight where ever it happens to be relative to the wheel and, for a brief moment, no weight at all, as it falls.

There are several problems which arise when the design calls for the pendulum to do something which doesn't take into account these features and I'd like to have run through some, but time, space and falling reader attention combine to persuade me otherwise.

Of course this all changes if the falling pendulum is designed to do work as it falls - and that's a whole new can of worms!

I should perhaps have included drawings to illustrate this, but the clock is always against me.

JC

10a2c5d26e15f6g7h10ik12l3m6n14o14r5s17tu6v5w4y4-3,’.

Bessler's Gera Wheel was moved by modest mechanisms of seemingly simple appearance.

Going by the designs I receive by email, from time to time, I notice that the majority of people have devised fairly complex designs in their efforts to solve Bessler's wheel.  Not complex in the way a petrol engine looks when you see an exploded diagram of one, but more complex than it might need to be.  I think the following points are worth bearing in mind when attempting to solve this conundrum.

Bessler was worried that people would think that the wheel wasn't worth the asking price once they saw how it worked and how simple it was.  He was also concerned that a glimpse of the workings or a careless word uttered, might give away the secret, and Karl, the Landgrave, described the wheel as being extremely simple

The Gera wheel, his first, measured 4.6 feet in diameter and only 4 inches in thickness.  The framework which supported the weights and the levers, or whatever else was contained within the wheel, must have been formed to supply a certain rigidity in order not to deform or break down when rotating.  We have no details on the size of the axle but assuming that it was of a sufficient size to keep the wheel stable and relative to the next thee wheel which were correspondingly larger, I think it must have been about 4 inches thick.

These figures suggest an internal thickness of three to three and a half inches maximum, which does not leave much room for the weights.  I'm sure they weren't as heavy as the ones Christian Wolff described as being about 4 pounds in weight, and they would have to have some room to accomodate an lateral movement. The motion of the wheel was described as being accompanied by scratching and scraping sounds, and this suggests that the levers were rubbing against each other as they moved, or the weights were scraping the internal walls of the wheel.

Finally I remain fairly certain that there were five mechanisms within the wheel for reasons additional to the ones I've described elsewhere and this helps to confirm the basic argument I'm putting forward here, that the solution will be found to be extremely simple and not of a complex design - and the mechanisms took up very little room.  The theory I've been working on for the last eighteen months or so, seems to suggest that although it looks simple there are at least two principles to bear in mind and I've recently found that I can distill the amount of mechanism down to fewer component parts and replicate the action I achieved with a more complex design.  This will, I hope, enable me to fit five of them within the wheel.

.

JC

10a2c5d26e15f6g7h10ik12l3m6n14o14r5s17tu6v5w4y4-3,’.

Never, Ever, Give Up.

I wonder if the apparent dirth of new ideas in this field of research is real or just a symptom of my own jaded perspective.  With regard to a solution to the age old problem of perpetual motion and more specifically, Bessler's wheel, I feel as though I have seen, read about or thought of everything I that anyone comes up with these days.  I still receive emails informing me of the auhor's excitement at the prospect of solving the puzzle of Bessler's wheel and they always wish to share their ideas with me.  I always used to be pleased to see what they came up with but long years of seeing the same ideas recycled over and over, has forced me to politely, I hope, and with appropriate gratitude, turn down the offer to share their new found solutions.  I always leave them with encourgemnt and suggestons as to who else they might approach with me success.

Johann Bessler, also known by his pseudonym, ORFFYREUS, did certainly invent a machine which turned continuously for the best part of two months, lift heavy weights and drive an archimedes screw for pumping water.  It survived numerous official and unofficial examinations during more than ten years, without even the slightest evidence of fraud being found, despite the most determined scrutiny.  I believe, as do many others, that the machine made use of the force of gravity to shift weights in a paricular configuration which created a contnual imbalance in the wheel which caused it to trun continuously.

I am constantly surprised therefore to find that instead of an increasing interest in this extraordinary invention, there appears to be a fading fascination with it.  Yet, in the light of the many problems concerning energy, I am amazed that no single person or department within any kind of research or educational institute has shown the slightest curiosity about why it worked or if fraud, how Johann Bessler did it.

My frequent conversations with strangers usually produces outright rejection of the very idea that such a machine might be feasable, but on hearing the evidence they appear to become more open-minded - at least while in my presence.  I suspect that later conversations they might have with others would proabably be met with the same scornful hilarity as is regularly shown to me, thus I do not blame them if their open-minds slam shut!

So all I can do until I, or some other poor obsessed soul, produces a working wheel is encourage you who happen by chance upon these words, to read my book about Bessler.  I called it, 'Perpetual Motion; An Ancient Mystery Solved?'  I included the 'question mark' to suggest that although I appeared to be claiming that the problem had been solved, I was asking the question, 'was it solved once?'

It details all the evidence I found during some thirty years of research.  I also produced, in an effort to provide more information, three of Bessler's self-published book, each with its own English translation.  You can find links to each book to the right. of thios page.

Good luck and don't give up - ever!

JC


10a2c5d26e15f6g7h10ik12l3m6n14o14r5s17tu6v5w4y4-3,’.

ACRONYM for Bessler technology anyone?

Thinking up an acronym, such as RADAR and LASER, to describe the new Bessler technology might be an interesting project, as suggested by Bill Mothershead in a comment recently.

In the early days of the internet, I formed a research group along with half a dozen others from around the world, which we called BORG, "Bessler Orffyreus Research Group".  We have long since gone our separate ways although some of the members are still active in this field.  I had also spent many moments considering options to describe this technology, just as Bill suggested, and I was unable to come up with anything as simple as the above acronyms.

LASER stands for "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation", which is a good if extremely brief description of the concept, but not the details required to build it. Similarly RADAR stands for "RAdio Detection And Ranging", another brief description of the basic concept.

So in our case we need a brief description of the concept which needn't include any description of how it is achieved.  At its simplest we need just the simple description of what it is designed to do, which, to those of us who believe Bessler's wheel was driven by gravity alone, means something along the lines of "Gravity Impelled Rotation GIR and you can add an 'O' for Orffyreus to make GIR-O but the term is too commonly in use for other things so no good.  We need a word not currently in use

You get the picture - it's not as easy as it looks.  Any suggestions welcome.

JC