I return to this subject from time to time, always seeking clarification. I know that gravity cannot be a source of energy, I've been told so more times than I can remember. But it does seem as though Johann Bessler thought that the 'heaviness', i.e 'ponderousness' or as they say in Latin the 'gravitas' of the weights inside his machine gave the wheel the necessary energy to continually rotate.
Notice that there is a subtle difference between what we know as 'gravity', which is some kind of force field which attracts other things of mass - and a thing's inherent 'heaviness'. Is there a difference? Bessler believed that it was the 'heaviness' of the weights in his machine which gave it the power to turn continuously, but we always take one step further back in the process, i.e. was it the thing that caused the 'heavinesss' in his weights which he did not know of and which we call 'gravity'?
Can it be that this whole apparently pointless enterprise, making a wheel turn continuously simply by constructing a clever configuration of weights, has been doomed to failure because man sought the source of the 'heaviness' when it did not matter where it came from, he should have just been glad it was and is there?
We accept several different forms of energy which we can turn to our advantage in one way or another but the fact that we know from where it originates and how it works and how we can best make use of it, is not neccessarily something we need to know. People have sailed ships using the wind as an energy source for millenia. Same for windmills for grinding corn etc. Others learned how to use water wheels in a similar way. Clock makers even used 'heaviness' to drive their weight-driven clocks, long before Sir Isaac Newton discoverd 'gravity'. Just because no one seems to have discovered how to manipulate weights to rotate wheel continuously does not mean it can't be done. I'm certain that Johann Bessler knew and yet he never mentions the word gravity in any of his publications, because it wasn't known about for many years after Sir Isaac Newton descibed it in Latin as 'gravity'.
My point is this, weights are inherently heavy, we know it is the effect of gravity but we don't actually need to know that to use them. Gravity is not a source of energy but it does create the conditions which can lead to a device being able to exploit the heaviness which gravity gives to an object of mass.
So when Bessler said, " NO, these weights are themselves the PM device, the ‘essential constituent parts’which must of necessity continue to exercise their motive force (derived from the PM principle) indefinitely – so long as they keep away from the centre of gravity." That is what he meant; the heaviness in the weights, not some remote force called gravity.
Interestingly he used the word ''gravium', at the end of the sentence above which I have translated as, 'centre of gravity', but I subsequently learned that the word ,'gravium', is the genitive plural of 'gravis' which I learned means 'heaviness', so Bessler uses the phrase 'centre of heaviness', which means the same thing but when you put it into the correct context of his time, you can see that he is not referring to the same thing as we are when we use the phrase 'centre of gravity'. He is simply stating that the centre of heaviness is at a certain point but has nothing to do with the force of gravity. We on the other hand, mean that the centre of gravity refers to the action of gravity on the whole structure and identifies the balancing point between both sides affected by the fore of gravity as the central point.
In the second paragraph I suggested that we habitually looked at the conditions prior to the use of weights, or what gravity did to the weights, whereas we should be looking at the weights themselves as they were at the time of their use. We have been looking one step back and ignoring the evidence in front of our eyes.
All we need to know is that the weights are always heavy just as long as gravity is affecting them.
JC
