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.
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