The Six Drawings which hold the Key to Bessler's Wheel.

I mentioned in a recent blog, that I had the solution to Bessler's wheel and that I had obtained the actual design of the mechanism from some of Johann Bessler's drawings.  This provoked the inevitable question, "which particular drawings were they?"  

I responded by suggesting that I would publish that information soon in one of my blogs. At that time. a few days ago, I was secure in the knowledge that I had the actual principle upon which the solution was based, and that without knowledge of it, the drawings, or I should say, illustrations, could not be of much help in trying to putting it all together to arrive at a meaningful solution.  Well of course now that I am persuaded to put my money where my mouth is, I am fearful that cleverer minds than mine may well deduce the answer with greater ease than my  lifetime's study has!  Yes it has taken most of the thirty or so years of building models which resolutely refused to move before I was able to apply the correct principle and move towards what I believe will be a successful conclusion.

The path that most have followed seems to be indicated by Bessler with these words on the front of the document we call Maschinen Tractate (MT):-

"N.B. 1st May, 1733.  Due to the arrest, I burned or hid all the woodcuts that prove the possibility.  However, I have left all demonstrations and experiments since it would be difficult for anybody to see or learn anything about a perpetual motion from them or to decide whether there was any truth in them because no illustration by itself contains a description of the motion; however, taking various illustrations together and combining them with a discerning mind, it will indeed be possible to look for a movement and, finally to find one in them'. "

I have embolden the critical words.  Firstly you need more than one drawing, and secondly, as Bessler says it will be possible to find a movement.  For movement you could also mean action as in the path taken, or the way something is moved or how, or the configuration that does what you want it to do.  I am now attempting to use this movement or action and make it relate to the principle I discovered and thereby get a working model.

Now the words quoted above are alway associated with the MT because of their close proximity to the drawings and because he states that some of them, presumably in MT,  have been destroyed or hidden.  He appears to be referring to the MT drawings, but this note was written in 1733, and even 32 years later they had not been published, and we have no knowledge about when they were drawn, maybe before 1733 or maybe later.  Perhaps they did not exist in their entirety in 1733. and one should therefore consider any other drawing to which he might have been alluding.  The only others which the public had access to then, are the ones in Grundlicher Bericht, Das Triumphens and Apologia Poetica.  I would say that without any doubt the answers you seek are to be found in those illustrations and I do include all of them.

I would point out that the binding together of all those documents appears to have been carried out after Bessler's death, judging by the page numbering in a handwriting not similar to Bessler's.  It should be noted that many of the pages are of different sizes and shapes and were reported by one recent witness to have been found in a loose stack and we don't know if all of them should have been included or only some.  The point is that in 1733 they were probably not complete and therefore, for Bessler to suggest to someone who might come across them perhaps subsequent to his arrest, that they held the secret to his wheel, he would surely not be indicating the document that we call Maschinen Tractate, but rather his already published ones.

One of the topics which has engendered discussion is the presence of pendulums in some illustrations.  They seem never to have been present in the actual machines which were examined so closely, otherwise some one would have mentioned them

The reason for the pendulum's presence has always seemed to me to have only one purpose, given that there is no record of anyone ever having actually seen them, other than on paper, -  they were part of a system of clues designed to provide everything needed to reconstruct a wheel. I used to suggest that the clues were there to provide dated evidence that he had discovered the secret before anyone else, giving him priority, but that argument does not stand up because, if some else did make a similar discovery after Bessler, he would sell his machine and thus Bessler's secret would be revealed and even if he was able show that he had discovered the secret before the later claim, proving priority would not earn him a penny in fortune or favour. So the real reason was the one he hinted at in Apologia Poetica, a posthumous recognition would be preferable to just giving the secret away during his life and thus being unable to fulfill his aim of founding a new type of school for trade apprentices.

To sum up, the pendulums are part of the answer but by no means all of it, but each drawing contains more  than one clue giving vital information that must be included in the final successful configuration. Not only must you find the correct configuration from within those six illustrations, , but you will need to put it all together so that it uses the principle of which I have spoken, but be warned, there are endless configurations to be extracted from them and they will lead you up many a blind alley - and I should know!

Finally, you will see that I have apparently discarded the whole of MT, but in fact I haven't, there are some clues there, particularly in the 'Toys' page which coincide with those suggested within the published illustrations.  There are also apparently random links which also have an echo within the same illustrations. There is strong evidence of another kind of coded information within MT and the other publications but I do not have sufficient information about them other than to say that I believe Oystein has made some good progress in identifying these.
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JC

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