This may be my last post until after the New Year so I would like to take this opportunity to wish every one a very Happy Christmas and a very prosperous New Year. I know I say this every year but .... will next year, 2015, be the one in which Bessler's secret is at last discovered?
In 2012 I placed a countdown clock here in the hope it would spur people on to find the solution to Bessler's wheel in time to celebrate the 300th anniversary from its first public exhibition. We missed it but it doesn't matter if we do it next year instead. 2015 would be a good year to celebrate. 1715 saw the introduction to the world of the Merseburg wheel, the first which could spin of its own accord in either direction thus refuting the accusation that it was driven by clockwork. Perhaps a successful wheel in 2015 that would be a fitting 300 year anniversary present?
I am trying to finish my current model before Christmas but things are a bit hectic so it may have to wait 'til next year before I find out if I'm any closer to the finishing line. I'm going to Florida for Christmas and hopefully the weather will be much better than here - how can it not be?! It is so relaxing not to have to run around getting ready for Christmas here, we can just chill out in Florida and enjoy the warmth! We'll be swimming in the heated pool on Christmas day or possibly sitting in the spa with a glass of something.
I dreamed the other night that there was a headline in a British newspaper which proclaimed, "70 year old retired British engineer discovers the secret of Perpetual Motion." What a disappointment when I woke up and realised it was just a dream! I'll be 70 next year and I think it's high time I succeeded. I guess we all have those kind of dreams from time to time and I think they spur us on to try and make it come true.
So will we succeed in 2015? Any one of us could be the one and I believe we all want it to happen soon or we'll be too old to enjoy it!
There's a book I came across the other day entitled "Wrong: Why experts keep failing us" by David H. Freedman. His 'experts' are, scientists, finance wizards, doctors, relationship gurus, celebrity CEOs, ... consultants, health officials and more. Briefly he describes how, for instance a medical journal might publish the results of a study which indicate a particular finding, which is seized upon by the media and hailed as a triumph of scientific research. Often only months later other results are published which call into question the original claims. For reasons unclear these latter publications are ignored or treated as irrelevant and the public advised to dismiss such evidence as unreliable.
These studies were presumably carried out in a rigorous manner and designed to obtain data which would allow careful analysis and result in the replacement of the conjecture and careless assumptions which had preceded it. So just because some inconvenient truths emerged there was no need to ditch them in favour of the first one.
This reminds me of the assumptions made by our old friend Hermann von Helmholtz that "the perpetual motion has been demonstrated by experiment to be impossible". How do you prove an impossibility?
Good luck in 2015! Remember "Science is a commitment to a belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman.
JC
10a2c5d26e15f6g7h10ik12l3m6n14o14r5s17tu6v5w4y4-3,’.
There's a book I came across the other day entitled "Wrong: Why experts keep failing us" by David H. Freedman. His 'experts' are, scientists, finance wizards, doctors, relationship gurus, celebrity CEOs, ... consultants, health officials and more. Briefly he describes how, for instance a medical journal might publish the results of a study which indicate a particular finding, which is seized upon by the media and hailed as a triumph of scientific research. Often only months later other results are published which call into question the original claims. For reasons unclear these latter publications are ignored or treated as irrelevant and the public advised to dismiss such evidence as unreliable.
These studies were presumably carried out in a rigorous manner and designed to obtain data which would allow careful analysis and result in the replacement of the conjecture and careless assumptions which had preceded it. So just because some inconvenient truths emerged there was no need to ditch them in favour of the first one.
This reminds me of the assumptions made by our old friend Hermann von Helmholtz that "the perpetual motion has been demonstrated by experiment to be impossible". How do you prove an impossibility?
Good luck in 2015! Remember "Science is a commitment to a belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman.
JC
10a2c5d26e15f6g7h10ik12l3m6n14o14r5s17tu6v5w4y4-3,’.
And a Merry Christmas / Happy New Year to you too, John. I certainly do hope the solution is found in the coming year and, of course, that I find it! However, realistically, I think that the coming year will be a "make or break" year for me. I'll either find success after a half century search or it will be time for me to "retire" and watch others bang their heads against the granite wall for a while.
ReplyDeleteI also maintain a healthy skepticism toward "experts" based on past bad experiences. I've found, on average, about half of them are incompetent, but would not admit it even if subjected to torture. The danger is that they can really screw up the lives of trusting victims who put their faith in them. For example, in the US currently over a hundred thousand people per year are killed due to "medical mistakes" made by so-called "professionals".
The Feynman quote is dead on accurate. Someone else said that science only advances when the skeptics that reject new data and theories finally die off and a new generation grows up that is familiar and comfortable with the new paradigm. It took almost a quarter of a century before Einstein's theory of relativity began to receive some acceptance in the world of science. He finally received a Nobel Prize, but it was not for relativity theory, but, rather, for an earlier paper he published that provided one of the first quantum models to explain the photoelectric effect. Even a half century after his 1905 paper on relativity theory, he had still received no official recognition for a theory that radically changed our understandings of space, time, energy, and matter.
Merry Christmas John, to you, and your family.The same applies to Ken and the rest. I do strongly believe, that next year the search will be over
ReplyDeleteIt is.
DeleteThis is the first Christmas of year zero of the Newtonian Gravity Era.
Happy Christmas to one and all.
I have to wonder why human beings would come up with such an elusive idea in the first place . Where did Bessler read " a wheel that could turn of it's own accord would be worth a ton of gold " ? Seems like Bessler made every effort be it genuine or not ( his wheel ) to put the subject of perpetual motion to rest once and for all , moreso perhaps than anyone else ever has or maybe even ever will . We have dreamt up such fanciful ideas as time travel and then in turn deemed it theoretically possible . I say why not something dead that moves as if it were alive ?
ReplyDeleteI've also wondered where the notion of a pm wheel first came from. It's probably something that goes back tens of thousands of years to when the wheel was first invented. Maybe they were only using the first wheels on animal drawn carts and then eventually discovered the water wheel and used it to grind grain. Once there was a water wheel someone probably came up with the idea of making a regenerative one; that is, one that would using falling water turning a wheel to then pump more water back up to keep it supplied with a fixed amount of water in the system. It was soon realized that such a wheel could only run as long as the amount of water falling per second was greater than the amount pumped up per second and thus any running wheel would eventually stop running when all of its supply water had been drained out of its raised reserve tank. Falling water was eventually replaced with falling weights and the pm motion would be maintained by keeping the center of mass of the weights always on the wheel's descending side by raising it as quickly as the rotating wheel tried to lower it. That, however, requires a continuous supply of energy to do and that energy can not come from outside the wheel or be supplied by a limited source such as wound up springs or compressed air. Bessler's design managed to provide that energy and had to obtain it from the mass of the weights themselves by using a simple, but unique mechanism. Actually, it's quite possible that various ways of doing this were found thousands of years before Bessler was born. Those devices, unfortunately, were lost to history, but the rumors of their existence persisted and have haunted inventors ever since. Bessler pushed himself farther than any of his contemporaries ever had in pursuing such a device and was lucky enough to finally obtain a working design. Anybody who wants to duplicate his achievement had better be prepared to do the same and also pray to be as lucky as he.
DeleteMerry Christmas and a Happy and Successful New Year to you too John! As my health and life slowly returns to normal I will do my share to prove the principle in 2015. I still stand by the basic principle documented in 2012.
ReplyDelete". . . to wish every one a very Happy Christmas and a very prosperous New Year. . . ."
ReplyDeleteA kind wish reciprocated fully here, John, and surely next year must be THE one. It must!
As a little tantalizer leading up to then - I have found a new-to-all (I believe) little Bessler bashing ditty! It is a rather lengthy little pounding.
This treasure was worked-up around the turn of the last century and is deliciously libelous to Bessler, and way-worse even; I am excited about it since it does appear novel. (I did a search over at the BWF of fame, but did not find any references to the title or an author.)
This particular little opus of pointillist excess was written by, yes!, a physicist type of that day, one that sorta' reminds me of the stuff put out by that other specimen of our own age, the wordy 'maniac-sy' over on his messy looking site of bloviatious, impudent strutting puffery.
This elder item of true cheeky excess is one of the best of the very worst sorts of cobblings to be seen EVER but, we'll all just have to await it's great unveiling while doing Xmasy sorts of things, such as issuing proclamations of love to ones already beloved (or, not really), declaring declarations of good intent (or, resolutions set up for the likely breaking) and etc., and of course, all best done while imbibing seriously Tom and Jerry's or eggnog's or whatever.
'Till then, to all but one I remain "Yours for more pep",
James
Thank you James. I look forward to you next offering -intriguing!
DeleteJohn
I've always believed that when a working wheel is realized, courtesy demands John Collins should be the first to hear about it. Confidentially.
ReplyDeleteIf I should find success in the coming year, then I will certainly announce it here as I am sure John would also do. However, there might be an annoying delay between announcing the achievement and finally presenting all of its details. It would be an important discovery and should be presented properly so that the information does not again "get lost" to history. I'm not convinced that just posting it on the internet is the best way to proceed.
DeleteMeanwhile, I've had several failures of various modifications of my "base" design that used different spring constants. I'm working on the assumption that Bessler did not make his own springs, but, rather, purchased "off the shelf" parts from a local supplier. If so, then I guess it's fair to assume that, for the small springs he used, their constants were available in increments of 0.5 lbs per inch and, for the larger ones, increments of 5 lbs per inch. I've got to try many combinations of these until I finally find the exact ones he used. The clues that relate to these constants are very carefully camouflaged. It's a lot of work and I'm beginning to appreciate how very delicately balanced were the levers and weights in his working design. Yes, he was quite right when he wrote that his secret was a "nut that would not easily be cracked". But, then again, Christmas is a great time for "nutcrackers"!
Ken if your wheel works does it need a push for it to start rotating?
DeleteI am currently working on the one directional wheel and, like Bessler's one directional wheels, it is self-starting. It will have to be restrained to keep it from accelerating up to its maximum speed. Two of these one directional wheels can then be mounted back to back on the same axle and, with the aid of an additional latching system, one produces a normally stationary wheel that must be given a slight push before it will start running and accelerate up to its maximum speed.
DeleteHow many weights did Bessler one way wheel have ?
DeleteThanks Johann,
Delete@Uneqk. His smaller one directional wheels would have had only eight weights. However, I've found some evidence that changed when he began constructing the larger one directional Draschwitz wheel and his later two directional wheels. For those I think he began using two weights on the end of each of their sixteen levers. That means that the two directional Merseberg wheel would have contained a total of thirty two weights. At four pounds apiece that means this wheel's lead weights alone came to 128 pounds. That was a fairly large percentage of the wheel's total weight and the reason that the weights had to be removed before Bessler and his assistant could move it to another set of vertical supports during official tests.
DeleteI need to correct something in that last reply I made. Bessler's one directional wheels only had eight levers and not sixteen as I stated. Only his Merseberg and Kassel wheels ever had the full sixteen levers in them which were necessary to make them work in either direction.
DeleteI couldn't agree more, the thing I think about sometimes is - if someone turns the wheel then people will say it's besslers wheel, but if more than one person turns the wheel with completely different systems within the wheel, are they both besslers designs?
ReplyDeleteI don't think we have to worry about multiple working designs popping up at about the same time as solutions to how Bessler did it. Most likely only one working design will come forth and if its performance matches that described for Bessler's wheels, then, most likely, that is the design he used. There are, of course, no guarantees of this happening. A design other than Bessler's might emerge that would approximately duplicate the performance of his wheels, but I still think that is very improbable.
DeleteKen your probably right.
DeleteMerry Christmas to you, John and all. And a Fantastic new year
Thank you Uneqk and my best to you too.
DeleteJC
Merry Christmas, John!
ReplyDeleteHope you and the family are doing well!
Hutch
Thanks Hutch, we're all just fine. Happy New Year!
DeleteJC
Merry Christmas guys!... the end game has begun!
ReplyDeleteHi John, if you wish to see the buzz saw wheel in person while you are in Florida, let me know. Happy New Year!
ReplyDeleteI would have liked to see it but my family have organised a complex itinerary which I dare not challenge!! Lol. Thanks for the offer so, and a Happy New Year .
DeleteJC
I was kidding a few weeks ago when I said it would be nice if Santa would give me the secret of Bessler's wheels as a Christmas gift. Well, that may be happening now! I had just completed the "acid test" for center of mass stability on my 1062nd wm2d model and, seeing that it was yet another failure, was seriously getting ready to celebrate New Year's by announcing my "retirement" from pm wheel research here. Sure enough, only a day later an entirely new approach to using spring tension to levitate my 9:00 o'clock levers came into my mind almost as though by magic. It's a radical departure from the approach I've been using for the last few hundred models and I'm very eager to try it. Why it never occurred to me before I'll never know, but I have it now. Thanks Santa and say hi to the Mrs. and your crew of elves for me!
ReplyDeleteYour welcome Ken. Ho Ho Ho and a Happy New Year
DeleteThanks Uneqk and the same to you. Yes, it's always nice when one's pm wheel research hits a dead end or a brick wall and then, all of a sudden, a solution appears. I haven't tried my new approach yet, but hope to later today. I'm hoping to obtain a final design in which the levers and their attached end weights shift smoothly and continuously during any 45 degree segment of drum rotation as the center of mass of all of the design's weights and levers stays continuously on the wheel's descending side. Count Karl probably viewed a small model that Bessler brought with him to a meeting with the count. Karl would have been able to slowly turn it by hand and actually see the smooth shifting of the levers with his own eyes. He would have then released the table top sized wheel and watched it spontaneously begin to rotate and then accelerate up to some maximum speed. He would have had no doubts that he was seeing a genuine imbalanced pm wheel in operation before he handed over the 4,000 deutchthaler "fee" for the privilege of taking a peek at what Bessler had invented. I want to see the same thing Karl did!
Delete@Ken
Delete"...an entirely new approach to using spring tension to levitate my 9:00 o'clock levers came into my mind almost as though by magic. It's a radical departure from the approach I've been using for the last few hundred models..."
It sounds like you are blazing your own trail to a solution, at least partially. Good for you. So it's been 4 days since this revelation. Do you have any progress to report?
@Zoelra. Sadly, testing of the new approach did not go well. It certainly looked good in my "mind's eye" and in an initial wm2d model, but, like all previous attempts, it still did not cause the ascending side weights and levers to shift fast enough so that the center of mass of all of the weights and levers would not swing below the axle as the drum rotated through the 45 degrees of a segment of rotation. Despite the disappointing failure, I did learn a little bit more about why my designs are failing and I have yet another modification that I am now pursuing. I'm now convinced more than ever that Bessler used two springs on each lever and they were attached at different angles to the lever. Also, they did not have the same spring constant value. This makes trying to reverse engineer his approach very difficult. I'm hoping that as I proceed I will get lucky enough to just stumble upon it. I'd hate to give up one modification before I found it and then the 1000+ models I've constructed / modified so far would have all been in vain. I "know" he did it. I "know" the design is supposed to be simple. And I "know" it only contained cylindrical lead weights, wooden levers, springs, and ropes. I shall keep at it and continue to report any progress, if any, that I make here. I'm hoping this will be the year and I'll find it before I reach model # 2000! It would sort of be nice if I hit it with something like model # 1712 or some other number relevant to the Bessler history.
DeleteDisappointing that you have not found the solution, but great that you found another that does not work, and you can move on. I've been rather silent of late because I'm hung up on purchasing some additional tools to continue with my designs. Well keep up the good work and I will be checking on your progress.
DeleteThanks, Zoelra. No doubt about it, Bessler's wheels have got to be the ultimate historical mystery and, considering they've remained so for 300 years so far, their secret will not be easily revealed. On the one hand we have a world full of orthodox scientists telling us we're delusional and wasting our time / lives with what, to them, must have been a hoax and, on the other hand, we have to endure one failure after another as we attempt to vindicate Bessler and show his inventions were real and that he was not a hoaxer. I'm to the point now where I have a basic lever design that does put the center of mass of the weights and levers where it should be. But, those levers must shift at precisely the correct speed as the drum rotates in order for that center to stay relatively stationary at that place on the drum's descending side. That rate is completely controlled by the spring tensions being applied to the levers. Bessler left clues as to what tensions to use, but those clues are mixed in with and hidden by a lot of other irrelevant clues. I'm to the point now where, if I find the correct set of spring tensions, it will be strictly a matter of luck. And, as we all learn in life, one can not depend upon luck when he needs it.
DeleteFlying home tomorrow (Saturday) - arriving Sunday. Leaving the warm weather (80 degrees) and returning to England, cold, wet, windy! Why am I doing this?
ReplyDeleteJC
Because you love the dank, as we all do. Welcome back to Blighty old boy!
DeleteAnyways it's the mildest winter we've had in a good while - 10C tomorrow! If this is all thanks to carbon emissions then free energy can wait a while longer, if you ask me..
Happy New Year John !
ReplyDeleteIt's still nice and warm in St. Lucia.
Quick update on my latest scheme: based on wholly subjective and likely quite wrong interpretations of the MT clues, i'm considering:
ReplyDelete- a radial armature with a moveable weight attached - its radius is variable, so could be a scissorjack or tubular lead roll sliding along a wooden pole. It lands on a rim stop.
- its extension & retraction is governed by a chord run around an axially-aligned square wheel upon the axle - its rotation causes a pulsing speed variation, accelerating and decelerating the armature in a 'whipping' motion; the purpose of this arrangement is to subject the weight to momentary high pulses of CF
- these CF peaks are used to lift axially-aligned overbalancing levers within the axle
Basic principle is thus that the system is overbalanced from within the axle, rather than the outer area of the wheel as more commonly found, while pulses of CF from the radially-mounted 'flail' withiin the wheel proper are applied back to the axle, re-lifting the weights back into an overbalanced position.
Stupid, probably, but it's the firsst design i've come up with in months...
Good luck with it. It sounds a little like MT39 to me. I went through a "scissorjack phase" a few years ago, but could get nowhere with it. It's possible to make scissorjacks with wm2d, but not easy and even a few of them in a design will make the processing of its sim slow to a crawl.
ReplyDeleteThey can be substituted with pulley systems performing exactly the same displacement ratios, but they're still a little flakey to sim.. Last night however i got stuck with the square pulley idea - the intention was that it would cause the armature to turn in fits and starts, but instead the sticky spots just torque the wheel instead - and the whole point was to have the armature turn indepenently of the wheel...
ReplyDeleteStill think there's a good clue in the Kassel water-screw picture - that square wheel will cause the water to be raised in 'glugs' rather than a smooth flow. And in that pic, and many MT ones, there's suggestions that work done at the axle is output energy (exiting the system via the window)..
But back to the drawing board for now..
I've often wondered why Bessler used that square pulley on the Archimedean water screw and the "forks" on the axle of the Kassel wheel and concluded that it must have been used in order to prevent slippage of the rope that connected the axle to the water screw.
DeleteI've got a little bit of "good" news to report. I am now very convinced that I have the correct spring constant and attachment points for the larger of the two springs attached to each of the levers inside of Bessler's wheels. I found a very unexpected clue for its constant and there can be no doubt that the value is what I am using. As far as the second spring attached to each lever is concerned, I have found multiple clues that might indicate the correct constant for it and I am still unsure of its correct attachment points. I have tentative values for these which I am now testing. The good news is that the current model using these tentative values for the second springs is able to reset all of the levers in only 6.3 seconds. Why is that important? The reason that it takes my model wheels exactly 7.5 seconds to rotate through 45 degrees. Usually, my levers do not reset at all or take over 7 seconds to do so. A reset time of 6.3 seconds is the fastest time I've ever measured and this is good because, the faster the reset time, the greater the chance of the center of mass of all of the weights and levers remaining on the wheel's descending side during rotation so that the much sought "pm effect" can be produced. Do I claim to "have it" now? No, I can not make that claim yet, but what I have so far is very, very impressive at least to me. Stay tuned for further developments.
ReplyDeleteKen, you just said "...it takes my model wheels exactly 7.5 seconds to rotate through 45 degrees...".
DeleteSo in 60 seconds your wheels rotate 360 degrees. That's 1 RPM. Are you limiting the speed for testing purposes?
The wheel needs 8 pulses / pauses / twangs per revolution.
ReplyDeleteThat's why there's 4 stampers raised twice on the lifting wheels.
And 4 pulses etc. from the square pump pulley, and 4 pulses from the 2 stampers on the pumping wheel.
The corollary suggestion there is that there's 4 or eight phases of low or zero torque per revolution, which might be just as telling as the power pulses themselves... i'm thinking in terms of the edges vs the corners of that square pulley. Dunno..
DeleteLatest idea is to try a whiplash effect a la MT 18 - the idea would be that the 'weeping' spring being lifted has a sliding weight halfway along its length, restrained by another weaker spring connecting it back to the axle. The second spring is meant to retract the weight after its been flung.
When it goes up and over, performing the whipping action, the weight is propelled outwards, like a fly casting motion, sliding to the end of the leaf spring whilst tensioning the retraction spring.
Then either use that radial travel of the weight to also try lift an axle-mounted overbalancing mass, or else the use the overbalancing weight of the flung mass itself to raise the axle-mounted weight.
I'll have a go at this later..
There was a time when I also thought that Bessler's wheels were delivering their axle torque in pulses. However, I am now convinced this was not the case. If the levers in his wheels shifted as smoothly as my models seem to indicate, then the torque output was relatively constant throughout an axle rotation. Yes, each of the stampers is raised and dropped twice during a single axle rotation (at least for the Merseberg wheel), but this is necessitated by there having been four stampers. It he had had two stampers, he could have had each one raised and dropped four times during an axle rotation. And, if he had had eight stampers then each could have been raised and dropped only once during an axle rotation.
Delete