Trading Width and Height, a Curiousity.

This subject regularly pops up on the besslerwheel forum but no progress has been made in finding a way to use the principle to advantage.  A few years ago I found something I thought might have some mileage, but I've never seen it discussed so I decided to offer it here.

In the drawing below, the curved red arrow in fig 1 shows the path of a weight on the end of a lever, starting at the twelve o’clock position it falls to three o’clock.  The green lines show that the width and the height measurements are the same.  The letter 'C' is supposed to represent the centre of a wheel and is therefore at the point of rotation of a proposed wheel upon which the mechanism is mounted

In the second drawing below the upper portion of the red curved line, shows by the green lines that the weighted lever has fallen a shorter distance than it has  moved horizontally.  On the other hand the lower portion of the red curved line shows by means of the blue lines, that the horizontal distance is much shorter than the vertical distance.

Can we use this to design a mechanical advantage? Arranged on a revolving wheel it might perhaps be possible.

I've done some work on this and I thought it might be of interest.  If you use the drawings or discuss it anywhere else I'd appreciate due acknowledgement and a link to this blog.

JC

Errant Assumptions - they are usually at the root of nearly all failures.

There is some muddled thinking going on and I'd like to clarify what I believe are facts.

Firstly Bessler's first two wheels began to spin spontaneously as soon as a brake was released.  For some reason a few people find this fact hard to accept.  For the wheel to do this means that it was in a state of imbalance at all times.  This is not hard to understand, in fact I think that it is a prerequisite for a continually spinning wheel.  The evidence that his wheels did start without a push is well documented and I am puzzled by the seeming scepticism that is engendered in some people's mind.

There is also a tendency to assume that there were eight weights and/or mechanisms in the wheels - why? The only evidence which includes the suggestion that eight weights were in a wheel, is in Fischer Von Erlach's report on his two hour examination of the Kassel wheel. As I've said many times, the Kassel wheel was different to the two earliest wheels because it could turn in either direction, whereas the earliest ones only turned in one direction, plus it needed a gentle push in one direction or the other before it began to accelerate to its maximum speed.  The conclusion is obvious and again is backed up by documentary evidence, the interior design of the Kassel wheel and it's predecessor, the Merseberg wheel were more complex.  So why assume there must have been eight weights inside the first two wheels?  Or, why try to design a more complex wheel before you've managed to build a successful one direction wheel?

Then there are the energy sources sought for the wheels; the minuscule depletion of mass to drive a twelve foot wheel!  Ridiculous!  Gravity enabled but not the direct source? Do we pick and choose which comments Bessler made and discard those we find hard to accept?  If we think Bessler's claims were genuine then the solution lies, as he said, within the weights themselves Manipulation of falling weights is the only possible scenario which ties in with Bessler's description and it must be possible even if no design has been discovered so far. It's not using gravity directly but using the result of gravity acting on a weight and making it fall.  Some say what's the difference? Well for those who are particular about such things, the fine detail must be examined, if we continue to believe Bessler, but at the same time accept that gravity itself cannot be used as a form of energy, that leaves, as Bessler, put it, the weights themselves.  The only energy available is that which results in the weights moving under the influence of gravity.

It's a bit like the official view on heavier-than-air machines before the Wright brothers showed how it could be done.  The theory of gliders was recognised long before the Wrights achieved powered flight, but before them there was no suitable engine, they were too heavy.  It was the introduction of an aluminium crank case which lightened the engine enough to allow the airframe to lift it in flight. Yet the academic response to their claims and even to a model that actually flew, was denial.  But people believed instinctively that it might be possible to fly an aircraft, in the same way that we believe that is possible to construct a weight driven wheel which will spin continuously.

We need to keep it simple, just as Karl described the interior of Bessler's wheel, so simple a carpenter's boy could make one if he was allowed to study it for a short while.  Anything which requires complex mechanics should be avoided.  Bessler was afraid that people wouldn't think the wheel worth so much money once they knew how it was done - that is what he said.

Ignore anything which does not apply to the one way wheels, but rule out nothing.  Conflicting advice?  No, but don't just assume eight weights/mechanisms are necessary.  Accept that the wheel started spontaneously when the brake was released.  Make a working model; the Wright brothers did and even then there were many sceptics who denied its possibility, so we have an uphill struggle even if a working model is produced so for that reason, in my opinion, simulations are a waste of time.

JC

Johann Bessler left Clues both Textual and Graphic.

It has always seemed obvious to me, that if Johann Bessler was genuine he would have wanted to leave precise information in a publicly accessible place, about how his wheel worked, otherwise without a sale, he could never dream of final acknowledgement of his amazing achievement, even if it was after his death.  The options are limited to placing such information in one or more of his published works, leaving it for post humous discovery, either connected in some way with his private vault, or in his papers which had not yet been published, including private notes, letters and of course his Maschinen Tractate (MT) which he never got around to publishing. He obviously intended to publish it but his circumstances prevented it.  We already know that some important information had originally been included in his MT because he says so on the frontispiece, that he has burned or buried some pages which reveal the secret but a careful study of the remaining ones may eventually lead to the solution.

This short piece of handwriting on the front of the manuscript, with its strong hint that the secret is available to those with eyes to see, has tempted many researchers to study the 141 drawings, some of which have short notes attached.  For me the secret has so far remained too well hidden, apart from the final page, curiously numbered 138, 139, 140 and 141, as if this page replaces the four he removed.  It does offer some interesting pointers, but more is needed I believe, before sense can be made of the odd collection of items, which I labelled the 'Toys' page, in my original biography of Bessler, 'Perpetual Motion; An Ancient Mystery Solved?'

The MT is also full of other pieces of code which seem to hint at hidden information, but although these can be readily identified, what information I have been able to interpret seems too scant to be of use. But there is another researcher (O) who has made some astonishing discoveries within the MT.

But with or without the mysterious MT to guide you, there are ample other areas suitable for study, which were clearly intended to lead the determined researcher to the solution.  Apologia Poetica, was Bessler's personal account of his long search for the secret of Perpetual Motion.  It contains a number of  different encoding methods, all of which appear to be legitimate and carry a hidden message.  I'm not going to go into them all in detail here but you can learn about some of them by visiting my other web sites all of which are listed on the right side of this page.

Logic suggests that somewhere there must be drawings which were intended to help us get to the secret of the wheel, because all the words in the world will never be equal to some graphic explanations. The only problem is that the drawings must be extremely cleverly disguised.  KB has claimed that he has managed to extract much encoded information that he says he discovered within the two portraits Bessler included at the front of his last and most professional publication, Das Triumphirende.  I cannot comment on what he has found as I have no idea what it is. Das Triumphirende, was a selling aid or advertisement for his wheel.  It is written in both German and Latin, which was  clever because all lectures at universities were carried out in Latin, so it would seem that he was appealing to the more intellectual members of society in the hope of gaining some credibility among those elite.

Within this book are a number of drawings which depict his wheel from various viewpoints and positions and these were very carefully drawn.  Again there are a number of what I would call, discrepancies, apparent errors, which litter the drawings, which might give the impression of carelessness, but a closer look shows how precise the drawings are.

JC

5th February - 72 today! Update

It's my birthday today so I thought I'd write something a little different.  First an update.

Building work is drawing to a close on my house.  My log cabin which is now known fondly, in my family as Bessler Research Activity and Inspiration  Nerve centre (BRAIN!)  is finished and has all my drawings, computer files etc in it, but actual hands-on work is now possible in my somewhat truncated garage.

I think I'm in pretty good health but I remember back in school reading George Orwell's book, 1984, and wondering if I'd make it to that date!  So far so good! That phrase reminds me of Steve McQueen's comment in the film, "The Magnificent Seven", when he said, “It reminds me of that fellow back home that fell off a ten story building. As he was falling people on each floor kept hearing him say, "So far, so good."'

Two people known to me suffered brain aneurisms last year, one was only 40 and survived thank goodness - it was touch and go; but the other, who was in her seventies died.  So it is not sufficient to assume good health is enough, you need some good luck too, to avoid these invisible weaknesses which can manifest themselves at any moment without warning.

So my new year resolution is to publish my research this year pending success or failure in my wheel building.  Now that I have my workshop back and the workmen are about to leave us in peace, I can get on with it all.

One of the unavoidable consequences of this research which is full of documentary information is that the information is ambiguous.  It is all presented in a 300 year old foreign language, it apparently includes encoded information, but no one is sure what this information is designed to reveal; will it be Bessler's last laugh, tying us up in knots in our attempts to extract real information, which is only the inventor showing us how he fooled everyone, or will it contain actual instructions for building his wheel?

This ambiguity leads to numerous false starts, and the dissemination of inaccurate or just plain wrong information presented as fact.  But as time goes by I see also a faint light at the end of a very long tunnel.  It is my firm belief that Bessler strived to leave sufficient information after his death, to allow us to work out his discovery and reconstruct his wheel, but he also had to find a way to prevent those people in his day from working out his secret.  These two requirements were and are incompatible. This makes our job doubly hard.  Are we in the 21st century any cleverer than those of Bessler's day?

People such as Blaise Pascall, Sir Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Leonard Euler - the list in endless, that tiny sample of people of Bessler's day demonstrates that the human mind was at least as ingenious as any today, so how do you go about leaving information encoded in such a way that people of those days could not decipher the message and yet others of a later age could do it?

I came to the conclusion mnay years ago that Bessler must have left something in his family grave which would point the way to full disclosure.  We know he obtained permission to be buried in his own vault in his garden.  I and another reseacher sought details of the burial site and came to the conclusion that the site was covered by a carpark, and was probably destroyed at some point prior to its construction.  The only other potential site was the windmill from which he fell to his death; but this did not belong to him and he must have built it assuming that he would return to his home and garden once that commission had been completed.  It is therefore most unlikely that that anything of value would be found there.  I have also visted the windmill which is still in existance although in a somewhat ruinous state.

To my mind that is the most likely method he might have chosen to direct those who searched for a solution after his death.  Nevertheless, I remain confident that my own research will provide a lead in the right direction if not the complete reconstruction and it will be apparent this year.

Cheers

JC