Johann Bessler's Dark Side

All that we know about Johann Bessler comes from documentary evidence  –  his own account, letters to and from and about him, newspaper reports and the testimonials – but much of this material throws up unanswered questions, so here are some reasonable - and some not so reasonable - speculations about the inventor.  Let us examine the dark side!

He mentions that he visited England and Ireland, why and how?  His headmaster was an excellent teacher but I doubt he taught his students to speak English, so how did a young German communicate during his journey?  He mentions that an Irishman was his travelling companion and since this was the era of the ‘Grand Tour’, he may have been a young aristocrat returning to his home in southern Ireland at the end of his own Grand Tour.  Often they would take along with them someone for entertainment value or as a general assistant, unpaid but fed. Bessler states that he learned to  speak various languages because of all his travels to different countries,  but not fluently, surely?

The Grand Tour was the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper class European young men of sufficient means and rank. The custom was associated with a standard itinerary. It served as an educational rite of passage. Though primarily associated with the British nobility and wealthy landed gentry, similar trips were made by wealthy young men of several European nations, (Wikipedia)

The young men took full advantage of their freedom and although the tours began with an adviser and guide to broaden their education to include works of art and visits to centres of high culture, they sometimes deteriorated into a series of sexual and/or drunken  debaucheries. 

On a previous occasion Bessler mentioned that ‘one day a fine gentleman came along, and ... I went off with him into foreign parts’.  Was this another Grand Tour he was invited to join or perhaps it was the one which took him to England and Ireland?  He mentions that they visited a monastery so it could have been the Ireland trip, although there are monasteries all over Europe.  What was it about Bessler that persuaded a man of wealth to adopt him as his travelling companion?  'Sex, gambling and drinking were all part of the Grand Tour experience. Florence, for all its Medicean splendour, was viewed as a sodomitical hotbed where the ‘Italian vice’ of homosexuality was, as it were, rampant'. (Not my words!  See google and 18th C Grand Tour). 

I'm not suggesting that Bessler was gay, far from it.  In fact he got his wife preganant before he had even met her father, the mayor, then after she died several years later, he got his best friend the Court blacksmith's 16 year old daughter pregnant and had to marry her too. 

In his youth he describes how hot-tempered he was and how sometimes in fights, knives were wielded.  Also dancing, duelling and drinking were his popular past times, but either from his own conscience or from a councillor, he tried more than once to stick to the way of proper conduct and moral integrity, but strayed from time to time. It seems as though he enjoyed life to the full but suffered pangs of guilt after any particularly shameful episode..

Another question - in his Apologia Poetica, he writes ' At about this time I began to run short of money, and so I turned to doctoring again. Thank God I was never short of a Frenchman or suchlike whose good nature I was able to influence, with my high-flown style of speech, to help me broaden my purse in return for having his fires quenched'.  The word used in German is Frantzmann, which translates into Frenchman, but apparently in the 18th century it was a derogatory term, but I cannot find why or to whom it was applied.  It is dangerous to try to read between the lines but I assume he had some health condition which caused pain and soreness and which Bessler could alleviate with some kind of ointment - or what? Anyway Frantzmann is definitely pejorative and generally aimed at the nobility which would agree with Bessler's use of 'high-flown style of speech'.

One acquaintance described him as that 'foul unwanted guest,'  while he was making ready to leave Kassel castle for Karlshafen.  But Gottfried Leibitz spoke of Bessler thus, 'Bessler is my friend ...many things have already troubled that good man, and he has not accommodated to the rules of the communal life.'  Bessler's years of wandering abroad had made him independent and self-sufficient, preferring to make his own arrangement than settle for help from another and he was sometimes blunt to the point of rudeness; but probably fear of losing his invention had added paranoia to a mix of hot temper, poor judgement about his so-called 'friends', and a decade of stress from continuously striving to convince the wealthy to buy his machine.  I think he appeared to be conceited, moody, sanctimonious, rude and was probably a loud mouth, but he could act with apparent humility; something he had learned would sometimes get him what he wanted.  I regret to offer this picture of a man I have always regarded as a neglected genius, but so many of them have normal human faults, perhaps exaggerated by time and distance and repeated name-calling, but I suspect much of it may apply to Bessler.

His shameless confessions about tricking many tradesmen into revealing the secrets of their trades could be described as entrepreneurial, but only if he had sold his machine and been accepted as a genuine inventor imbued with great wealth.  He tells us about a trip to Dresden where, 'I got to hear about a craftsman that I felt I had to get to know. So I devised a plan to bring it about. I met one of the craftsman's apprentices, who was from Sorau and was called Sigismund, and put him in the picture over a few glasses of wine, which I treated him to. Over the next few nights we worked out the details in my room. He passed me off - I swear it - as a carpenter.  

So devious must be added to his personal repetoire, although to be fair, life was rough in those times and to get aywhere you had to be tough and resourceful.  Bessler was certainly that and he might just have made it to the top... unfortunately it didn't happen and he was judged a dispicable fraud and he disappeared into the fog of history, abandoned, in poverty and still designing machines, which bore slight similarities to his original perpetual motion machine.

JC