I decided to post this both here and the the Besslerwheel forum to publish my idea about the secondary force involved in Bessler's wheel and hopefully generate some discussion about its potential as possible step forward towards a solution.
I could apologise for writing in simple terms without the use of numbers and formulae, but I won't because I think they put people off and confuse some fairly basic concepts.
Bessler’s wheel used weights, he makes that
clear. Weights can only have an effect
if they either overbalance something or they fall – I leave impetus and inertia
to one side for now.
Gravity enables the weights to fall, or as I prefer
to say, it makes them fall, therefore let us cut out all the dancing
around and say that Bessler’s wheel is driven by gravity.
What about gravity?
It supposed to be a conservative force, but what does that really mean?
To me it simply means that it conserves its energy, or to put it another way,
it’s a continuous force, therefore no matter how much work it does it is never
diminished, at least not as far as we are concerned here on earth.
We are taught that you cannot obtain continuous rotational
motion from gravity i.e. in a wheel. The
reason is that the force acts on all parts of the wheel at the same time, so
that even in a overbalancing wheel the falling weight has to be lifted back to
its pre-fall position and it has to be lifted against the force of gravity.
In fact this does not preclude the possibility of achieving
continuous motion, its just that no one could see how it might be
achieved. It is correct to say that
gravity having made a weight fall, cannot be used to also raise the same weight
again. We need another force to raise it
back to its pre-fall position. For
hundreds of years perpetual motionists have searched for the other force without
success. Even today we continue to look
for the means to lift the weight back up and many have been forced to conclude
that it is indeed impossible to find a force capable of acting quickly with
equal power to gravity.
That force has been under our noses all the time. Gravity is the only available force which
matches the desired criteria. Obviously
we cannot use the falling weight’s own kinetic
energy to raise it or another weight back up, because that energy has already
been used to rotate the wheel a little.
The answer, it seems to me is to have another weight whose
sole purpose is to raise the first weight back up. Obviously this second weight cannot have an
effect on rotation or it would negate the rotation gained by the first weight.
Bessler have us two good
clues about this. Firstly he said his
weights worked in pairs, and this seems to support the second weight
notion. And he also described in his
Apologia Poetica how “A great fat herd of fat, lazy, plump horses
wanders aimlessly”. I think that this
describes the weights whose job it is to raise the fallen weight, in their
inactive state. When they are not
raising the fallen weight they must be in a neutral position, possibly their
action takes place in the Z plane but I have design which does not require
that.
JC
