Preface to today's blog
I have considered the following points, for several months but until now, have settled for merely stating my opinion rather than discussig the point. Lack of space necessitates brevity so the examples are limited but will hopefully be sufficient to sway some of you to my point of view.
After all this time one would think that some progress would have been made towards solving Bessler's wheel. I know there has always been a strong bias among those who believe in him, that his machine required some additional force to assist the weights to overcome their final hurdle and complete a full circle. The reason for this bias lies, of course, in the strongly held conviction that gravity alone, cannot achieve this.
Those of us who take Bessler's words as true, and believe that there was no additional force necessary, are undoubtedly in the minority. Yet the sheer lack of progress in identifying the additional force seems to me to prove that it is less likely to lead to a solution than to stick with Bessler's words - and work on the assumption that no additional force is required. All available forces have been considered and nothing has worked. So where do we go next?
I have described Bessler's wheel in the past as a gravity wheel, this was wrong; it does not run on gravity; no more than my car runs on petrol, diesel or gasoline. What does that mean? We all blithely talk about autos and their gasoline engines for instance, but even though we call it a fuel, actually it's just a liquid with some useful properties. We fill the tank and then it is drawn through the fuel pipe and into the combustion chamber - after being mixed with air - and ignited. The subsequent explosion leading to a rapid expansion of gases, drives a piston down or upwards as required and this causes the first real movement, and the crankshaft turns. This was originally termed an internal combustion engine and the fuel used to create the explosion could be almost any combustible material. Denis Papin and Christian Huygens in 1680 used gunpowder to create the explosion in a gunpowder engine consisting of a vertical tube containing a piston.
A steam engine relies on coal, which has to be burned, to heat water, to produce steam which is another rapidly expanding gas, and that thrusts a piston up, or down, another example of the first real movement. Coal is just fossilized trees and is simply a fuel burnt to heat the water to create the expanding steam, but it does not directly fuel the engine.
The electricity we use is generated by steam turbines using water heated by burning coal, and now nuclear fission, but the basic concept is very simple and not dissimilar to that used by James Watt in his steam engine.
If, for the sake of argument, we leave aside all the life on this planet, nature has only two ways to generate movement; one way is through heat, and the other is gravity. Nature generates heat in a number of ways, chiefly from the sun warming the planet and from volcanic action. The subsequent temperature variations can lead eventually to hurricanes, typhoons and tornadoes. The temperature variations can have odd effects; some rocks in deserts appear to move of themselves but it is due to intense heat during the day and very cold nights, expansion and contraction plus gravity, makes them move.
I know there are some out there who think Bessler may have designed a machine that ran on ambient temperature changes. As a retired engineer I feel certain that you could never create a wheel using such technology, which operated at the speed Bessler's did, nor start up so quickly, and not with that much power, 300 years ago. So we are left with nature's only other motion instigator - gravity.
So far, I have focused on the final step which was the moment of movement, but the previous step was what caused the movement. There is a common denominator in the descriptions of the above engines; they all require an input of heat to generate the first movement. Should we be looking for a solution to Bessler's wheel using heat?
It may appear that I have proved that Bessler had to have used heat of some sort to generate rotation in his wheel, because the alternative is said to be impossible - but - nature has both solutions available to her and if you think about the moving rocks in the desert, they used temperature variation and gravity to move themselves. There are many examples of gravity operating in nature. Rock falls, water falls, rain, floods, land slides and avalanches, the tides both during and away from the full moon; and it has been said that the solution, if it exists, will be found in nature- and - I am utterly convinced that Bessler didn't use temperature variation, or we would have had
reports of burning smells, smoke, heat etc, accompanying each
demonstration.
We have tinkered at the edge of this virgin technology, using gravity in watermills, and weight-driven clocks, for example but no one has given a hard, fresh and new look at why we think we cannot build a continuously turning wheel, as Bessler did.. Rather than looking at each possibility, the world of science and engineering have repeated parrot-fashion the old, old story that gravity is not a source of energy and therefore Bessler's wheel was a fake. I have news for you, gasoline does not provide the energy for an auto engine, heat does, generated by burning the fuel which is stored in the tank. Gravity does not provide the energy for Bessler's wheel, the weights do. Gasoline enables the heat to be produced to move the piston, and gravity enables the weights to move and overbalance the wheel.
It is my belief that, like gasoline, coal and oil which each form part of a series of steps, gravity will prove to be but one step in the process of finding a way to manipulate weights to create continuous rotation in a wheel, just as Bessler did, more than 300 years ago.
JC
